Hyundai Motorsport is considering fielding four 2022-specification Rally1 factory cars through the second half of next year’s World Rally Championship season.
The team has already emphasized its focus on title success over running customer Rally1 cars next season and team principal Andrea Adamo says a fourth works i20 would help in that fight.
Veteran Dani Sordo and rising star Oliver Solberg will share the team’s third official car through the first half of 2022, but both could join Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville on a more permanent basis as the season progresses.
“In the first half of the year, I hardly see this possibility [to run four cars],” Adamo told DirtFish.
“In the second half the chance could be not bad. We cannot forget the number of test days we have is still limited, so maybe we can have some more sport – the more we run the car the more experience we are going to be taking.”
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Adamo added that there would be no let-up in Hyundai Motorsport’s program of development on smaller, national-level events. He said contesting events like Rally di Alba in Italy or Otepää Winter Rally ahead of this year’s Arctic Rally Finland bring benefits for all.
“Why not continue to this? Everybody is looking at opportunities to do more development and more testing – I cannot deny this. But I think everybody, the FIA, the promoter and anybody else cannot deny the attention we raise on the WRC from doing those events in places where they didn’t previously have the chance to see these cars.”
With the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally coming just three weeks after the Rally1 cars are homologated on January 1, running an event ahead of the French Alps classic is unlikely. A return to the usually snow-covered Otepää event in Estonia is a more likely option ahead of February’s Rally Sweden. Thereafter there are numerous options to prepare for Croatian asphalt or Portuguese gravel of rounds three and four.
