World Rally champion Kalle Rovanperä has pushed Toyota to improve how the GR Yaris Rally1 uses its tires after the team was exposed on the recent Rally Chile.
All three Toyota drivers struggled badly on the second morning of the South American event, chewing through their tires on what proved to be particularly aggressive stages for tire wear.
But Toyota’s misery was self-inflicted after it made a mistake in not selecting any hard compound tires at all for Saturday morning’s loop of three stages.
So while eventual winners M-Sport and Ott Tänak aced it with their choice of four hards and two softs, both Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta punctured on the final stage of the three, while Rovanperä backed his pace off dramatically in order to avoid the same problem.
It looked to have cost Toyota a podium finish until Teemu Suninen retired his Hyundai on the penultimate stage and allowed Evans to secure third.
Rovanperä, who finished fourth, called the decision to take all-softs “just too optimistic” but suggested Toyota’s struggles were down to more than just its incorrect decision.
Asked what his biggest learning point from Rally Chile was, the Finn told DirtFish: “I think just overall what kind of car you need and understanding better the really high tire wear and stuff, so that’s something I think we can try to manage in the future.”
Rovanperä’s team-mate and now only WRC title rival Evans described his weekend as one where he “didn’t capitalize on all the opportunities” but suggested he had things to learn himself about how to manage tires.
“It was challenging,” Evans told DirtFish. “For sure kicking myself looking back that I didn’t manage those softs a little bit – kind of, you know… I would have gone slower but faster if you know what I mean?
“And that would have definitely changed the outlook. But you live and learn.”
Katsuta agreed with Evans.
“For sure like tire management itself is very, very demanding and difficult at that moment [on Saturday morning],” he said.
“Obviously top drivers, even second pass, we had hard tires but still you had to [be] managing the tires. That was something new for all of us.
“So [it’s a] very good lesson for me. I need to look after this rally, I need to look at the onboards and how Ott and the guys are doing for tire management.”
Technical director Tom Fowler explained that Toyota’s choice not to take any hards was a data-driven decision but didn’t feel it was necessarily a mistake.
“I think what happened is the calculation was off and our other choice was to ignore our normal process, our normal calculation, and that would be a mistake,” he told DirtFish.
“The way we need to look at this is in one season we’re making, I don’t know, I’m going to quickly say 70/80 tire choices in one season perhaps. This one’s obviously not gone how we want it to, but 70 something-else other ones have gone pretty well.
“We’re not going to change our process, we’re just going to make sure the data that’s behind our process is more accurate.”
