Hyundai Motorsport president and team principal Cyril Abiteboul has revealed the team has one development joker left to spend on its i20 N Rally1 – but isn’t sure how to use it.
Hyundai homologated an updated version of its Rally1 fighter in time for February’s Rally Sweden – the car featuring new suspension kinematics and improved weight distribution among other tweaks to make it quicker on softer surfaces in particular.
That car has only been used on one round so far in 2025, as Hyundai began the season with its old car in Monte Carlo and also used it at Safari Rally Kenya due to a lack of both component availability and faith that the updated parts would be reliable enough.
That was an eyebrow-raising decision, but Hyundai recorded its first ever double podium in Kenya with Ott Tänak second and Thierry Neuville third.
Abiteboul however was not content that all of the car’s reliability issues had been solved.
“Reliability is a bit of a moving target,” he said. “You solve something and then the next problem is going somewhere else. It’s all about fuses, you know – it’s which fuse is going to be triggered first.
“Last year we knew it was our propshaft issue and gearbox casing. This year it sort of moved to the driveshaft. But it’s difficult.
“Anyway, we don’t have enough jokers to change the whole kinematics of the car. That was our plan, but that plan was canned for regulatory reasons. So it is what it is.”
But Hyundai can make a small improvement to the car, it just needs to decide where.
“There are still some residual issues in the transmission that we could not change completely due to the joker situation. We do have one joker left, so it will be interesting what we make out of this event in terms of technical strategy and joker strategy,” Abiteboul added.
World champion Thierry Neuville was pleased with the i20’s performance in Africa, but not its reliability.
Neuville was pleased with the Hyundai's speed in Kenya, but didn't expect so many reliability problems
“I honestly expected that we would have less reliability issues, but unfortunately we didn’t,” he told DirtFish.
“So we need really to put the finger on that – repeated issues over the past years and that shouldn’t happen. So that’s very frustrating.
“But on the other hand, never the crews, never the team gave up and continued fighting hard to… yeah, get it through and get it to the end.
“So finally we have two cars at the finish, two cars on the podium, only Adrien [Fourmaux] wasn’t able to do the whole event, but still taking the 10 points. So performance; good. Reliability; to improve.”
