Hyundai team principal Cyril Abiteboul wants the team to feel the impact of its new technical director, François-Xavier Demaison, by next week’s Rally Estonia.
Demaison – who before becoming technical director for the Williams Formula 1 team worked in the World Rally Championship with manufacturers like Peugeot, Subaru and Volkswagen – joined Hyundai on June 1.
Abiteboul, who also joined the team this year, had made signing a technical director one of his top priorities.
Hyundai scored its one and only victory of the season so far in Sardinia on Demaison’s first weekend, which prompted Abiteboul to joke that the Frenchman “maybe had it a little bit too easy for his first rally with us in Sardinia!”
However, Hyundai endured a difficult Safari Rally Kenya, particularly on Esapekka Lappi’s car as the propshaft on his i20 N Rally1 broke four times throughout the weekend.
Demaison has been limited in what he can achieve so far given the tight technical constraints of the WRC with its homologation joker system, and the fact he has only been a Hyundai employee for six weeks.
But Abiteboul has high expectations of his new hire, as he wants the team to be able to feel the F-X effect as early as Estonia next weekend.
“I would like to think that… it’s not that I’d like to think, we need that very quickly and we need that for the next rally,” Abiteboul told DirtFish when asked when Hyundai can expect to see a positive effect from F-X’s appointment.
“Clearly that propshaft situation is clearly not acceptable, not understood, not controlled. So the first thing I’d like to see is he’s bringing the team and all stakeholders involved together so that there is a thorough analysis of the situation and that we’ll be able to find the right containment measures that we clearly need.
“Until we are able maybe to develop a strategy involving jokers and more medium to long-term evolution, again the first changes need to be seen in the next rally.”
Abiteboul would like Demaison to “adapt the structure in order to command the changes that are needed in the team”.
He added: “The change is not in people but really mindset, in procedures, in discipline – that’s what we need, but in order to have that we need a building platform.”
Hyundai has a mixed record in Estonia.
It scored a 1-2 with Ott Tänak and the late Craig Breen when the event first joined the WRC in 2020, but was beaten by Toyota and Kalle Rovanperä in both 2021 and ’22.
Hyundai does however have more Rally Estonia podiums (five) than any other manufacturer.
Teemu Suninen will make his WRC Rally1 debut on the event alongside regular full-time drivers Lappi and Thierry Neuville.
