Hyundai Motorsport team principal Andrea Adamo says nice things. Of course he does. Especially when his cars are winning. But even when they’re not, there’s still room in Adamo’s vocabulary to praise the team that has made those cars faster rally-by-rally.
Last month, it was announced that Dani Sordo and Craig Breen would be alternating in the driving seat of the third full-time Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC entered for the 2021 World Rally Championship season, the two having previously also shared the car with Extreme E-bound Sébastien Loeb.
The other two cars maintain their 2020 pilots, Thierry Neuville and Ott Tänak, and are drivers Adamo has many good words for after they secured Hyundai the manufacturers’ title for a second year in a row and turned the i20 Coupe WRC into an all-round better package in the process.
“Everyone who drove for Hyundai in 2019 and 2020 deserves to be seriously supported by me personally as a thanks for all the jobs they have done,” Adamo told DirtFish.
“Thierry has done in 2019 and 2020 an amazing job. In 2019 he was always there; he was pushing everyone. 2020 he started winning in Monte Carlo, he had some issues, he did a mistake somehow in Estonia if we want to call it a mistake. [At Monza] he did a mistake.”
He is actually praising his driver, don’t worry.
“I did so many mistakes in my job that no one pointed out because I’m not always under the camera, it wasn’t spotted immediately.
“But he remains with us, he was supporting everyone, and I really like this.”
What about Tänak, who became World Rally Champion with Toyota in 2019 and then immediately jumped ship to join Hyundai?
“Ott, what can I say? He is really someone very smart, very clear, who is working very well with Thierry.
“And I think they together have allowed us to really increase the performance of the car a lot because they work clearly together, share opinions, share information, and this has allowed us really to jump up in the performance.
“We have to be honest with ourselves in life. In 2019 I think we won the manufacturers’ title because we were more reliable, not faster. This year I would say we were much faster than last year, and we were competing [on] every rally for the lead.
“It was not that we were behind and grabbed the win just because somebody else retired or had a technical problem.”
After Neuville’s Monte Carlo win, Tänak claimed his first Hyundai success on home soil in Estonia and then Sordo won Rally Italy for the second year in a row.
Breen challenged Tänak in Estonia, which was his second appearance of the year, while nine-time champion Loeb took stage wins and a podium on Rally Turkey.
The scores of these five drivers combined outdid the efforts of Toyota’s full-time trio – something that Sébastien Ogier described as “weird” given he and Elfyn Evans finished 1-2 in the drivers’ standings.
