Adamo: New i20 N Rally2 isn’t out to kill opposition on debut

Hyundai Motorsport team principal Andrea Adamo has played down expectations of the i20 N Rally2 on its World Rally Championship debut this week.

The world’s newest Rally2 car was homologated on August 1 and will be driven by Oliver Solberg and Jari Huttunen on Ypres Rally. Adamo has previously outlined the importance of this car and the importance of Hyundai Motorsport learning from mistakes made with the original i20 R5.

The i20s will face WRC2 competition from M-Sport Ford’s Teemu Suninen and Tom Kristensson, and the Volkswagen Polo R5-driving Nikolay Gryazin, and Adamo isn’t expecting to be beat them from the off.

“We don’t have to think: ‘Hey, we are Hyundai, we come here and we kill everyone…’. We have to come humble and show what we have done against the big names,” Adamo told DirtFish.

“We have done one car [i20 R5] and this is the second one. We take the experience and the knowledge of the mistakes we made with the first one and we come now with this. For sure we have done a big development job, my people have done an incredible job.

“I have seen things running pretty smoothly, but like you would say in England: ‘When the flag drops, the b******t stops’. We don’t talk b******t, but there are things in the stress of the event that can come.

“I want to say I am an optimist. I think my people in Hyundai Customer Racing deserve to see a great race, not necessarily in Ypres, but in the second half of the season.”

The i20 N Rally2’s original homologation date of July was postponed by a month, but Adamo explained the reason.

“We targeted July 1, but we postponed until August 1. The FIA was very helpful in understanding the difficulties, I have to say. We had a perfect co-operation; in Italian, we say the devil is never so bad as described. It was really smooth. There were some things in the interpretation, we clarified this and everything was good.”