It’s 6.41am on a Friday morning, and Dani Sordo’s choice word is “difficult”. Several times. He’s describing how he’s shipped 28.8 seconds to Toyota’s Sébastien Ogier on the 12.18 miles of Aspremont – La Bâtie-des-Fonts, the opening stage of the day on the Monte Carlo Rally.
Hyundai Motorsport team principal Andrea Adamo doesn’t mince his words, and says Sordo’s performance shows he’s “lost in the middle of nowhere”.
Now losing that amount time on a stage being held on icy roads, before the sun has even risen and in an area which the pacesetter knows like the back of his hands isn’t awful for even one of the world’s top professional rally drivers. But the problems went deeper for Sordo, who assured stage-end reporters that his Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC was doing its job just fine, but he was driving “really, really bad”.
He dropped another 32.6s on the next stage, and then another 37.8s on the first stage after the sun had risen. Over 39.43 miles he had fallen behind by 1m39.2s.
Hyundai had chosen a strategy of three slick compound Pirellis and three of the studded winter tires for Sordo and team-mate Thierry Neuville for the Friday morning loop, and they paid the price with not enough ice and snow on show.
“This is tough to go on like this. After with this tire in the rear, the car moved a lot and there is even more movement and more difficult, there was no confidence at all,” Sordo said of how the car handled with the mixed tire arrangement – with the winter tire attached to one of his rear wheels.
But the “tough afternoon” Sordo predicted didn’t come, with a far smaller 10.6s lost to the stage winner on SS6 and 1.3s on the final Chalancon – Gumiane stage where he was actually up on Ogier through the first two splits and looked totally committed with his throttle control. It was all down to the tires.
“With these tires, I feel a little bit more comfortable and the grip was more or less constant. OK, aquaplaning still, but I have more constant [feedback] with the car and I was learning more the grip and I was more confident.
“In Monza [last year] it was a little bit the same conditions as now on the last stage, because it was raining but we have all the time with this winter tire – you can manage it very well and you can feel the grip much better than with the slicks.
“This was why I was good there, because I was having a good feeling with the car alone and this is what I see now in this stage. I have really good feeling, I feel the movement, I feel the grip. When you feel the car, you can push.”
Adamo takes the hit for poor choice
Hyundai's Thierry Neuville and Dani Sordo took three snow tires in their package whereas the majority selected two; an incorrect decision Andrea Adamo has taken responsibility for
Adamo took the blame for getting it wrong with tires in the morning, and was still not happy at the end of the day despite Sordo’s improved pace.
“They [the drivers] aren’t happy as well, because performance is not there and there are things that we have to put together,” he said.
“We have seen Dani doing basically the Ogier time in the last one, this morning [he was] lost in the middle of nowhere, in the first time not going, the other going up and down. So far, it’s not been the rally for which we were targeting for and not the rally that Hyundai should do.”
How will Adamo ensure his drivers can match seven-time Monte winner Ogier again through Saturday’s stages?
“Want the politically correct answer?” he asked WRC All Live reporters. “For sure let me say maybe try to put more together the ideas and… channeling the idea in the proper way.”
