“We should be a much more… let’s say, pain in the a** for Toyota than we’ve been last year!” smiled Hyundai’s technical director François-Xavier Demaison.
“Last season was just a dream,” reflected deputy team principal Juha Kannkunen. “It doesn’t happen in decades, that kind of situation we had last year.
“Hyundai has done a lot of hard work. It will be an interesting season again.”
The next 14 weekends of World Rally action will ultimately answer that question. But Hyundai has good reason to believe in a better season than 2025.
“It will be difficult for us to do worse [than last year]. And it will be difficult for Toyota to do better. So maybe we can find something in the middle…” remarked Thierry Neuville.
The regret of 2025
Did Hyundai introduce its 'evo' i20 N Rally1 too soon?
It’s hard to argue with Neuville’s summary. Toyota totally aced last season, but it equally wasn’t challenged by a full-strength Hyundai.
That’s not Toyota’s fault, of course, but it does give Hyundai confidence it can respond now that it’s worked on some of its issues.
The main one being the car.
“It was a very difficult year for many reasons,” Demaison told DirtFish. “Let’s say there was a big rule change, dropping the hybrid, changing the engine restrictor, changing the weight, bringing some new fuel very early in the season.
“I think, clearly, we underestimated the amount of work to do this. We had a new tire manufacturer, which is, I mean, a big job when you consider that you have only 21 days of testing on the road outside of your permanent base, so on top of that we introduced a big step on the car which… you know. needed some adaptation for the drivers, for the team.
“Normally with big step like this you unlock some performance, but you need a bit of time to adapt to it. So these three parameters together makes it… mainly because we didn’t have enough testing. We needed tests to improve the reliability of the new car, we needed tests to adapt the setup in the new car, we needed tests to adapt the powertrain.
“And we needed a lot of tests for the tires, to learn these tires, so that was for sure too much for us. That’s why we believe that this year, the tires we know, we do a big effort to know them better; the car we know, we made a few changes with the extra two jokers we got to make it more reliable and a bit more performant.
“And Tarmac, where we were really not good, we saw some improvement in Japan, so we are confident that ’26 would be better than ’25.”
Hyundai has spent two development jokers on its i20 N Rally1, improving the transmission. That’s on top of the raft of changes it introduced at Rally Sweden last year, which didn’t always prove beneficial to performance.
Demaison believes Hyundai made a misstep in rolling out that ‘evo’ car when the team was trying to understand all the other changes for WRC 2025.
“The step we did on the suspension was quite big, with the damper arrangement and kinematic friction. So we had to spend a lot of tests to adapt the setup to the car. We clearly underestimated this,” he said.
“We should not have introduced this car together with the tires and the powertrain rules.
“We should have clearly just waited for this year. I mean last year was enough [to learn] with the tires, and I think that was the biggest mistake.”
Neuville agreed.
Neuville agrees with Hyundai's technical director over last year's struggles
“It was a combination of several things, I think,” said 2024’s world champion. “A combination of tires and a new car, it’s a lot to work with. We had been testing on Pirelli tires only because Hankooks weren’t available and we didn’t have any chance to test it.
“So we did a lot of work on a new car with Pirellis and when we discovered Hankook, we thought a lot of problems were coming from the [different characteristics of the] tire. But we realized that maybe it was somewhere in the middle again, and we realized it very late.”
Reason for optimism
The other compromise to Hyundai’s season last term was the split effort between the existing WRC program and the new World Endurance project, which hits the track for the first time later this year.
Team principal Cyril Abiteboul began attending fewer and fewer rallies as a result, but took action in the hiring of figures like Andrew Wheatley as sporting director.
Neuville spoke a lot about this internal focus throughout 2025, and new signing last year Adrien Fourmuax noticed it too.
“[But] in the last four, five, six months maybe I really started to see and feel the Hyundai ‘mode’ pushing for rallying and getting the best out of the car and the team – and I can see that they are back to a good level,” he told DirtFish last weekend.
The new test base in the south of France is another good example, as that now affords Hyundai good gravel and Tarmac roads for unlimited Rally1 running.
“I think what definitely helps as well is to see that the team is fully motivated,” said Neuville. “There’s been a couple of changes, restructuring as well. The infrastructure changed from middle of last season is more or less finished as well.
“So I would say there’s a lot of signs which are very positive for a better season.”
It’s a matter of becoming as great as the sum of its parts again. Hyundai never lacked speed, but consistency.
Demaison: “I mean, we showed performance, but what we were lacking was mostly consistency. So we hope that with the test program we have now, the change we made for the permanent base – we’ll have a very good Tarmac road and some very good rough gravel road with our gravel test base – will help us to improve the reliability for sure.
“We hope that we will learn also on the way to manage the tires better on this rough rally and have less punctures. I think that will help for the game and we should be a much more… let’s say, pain in the a** for Toyota than we’ve been this year!”
The first leg of the battle starts tomorrow.
