The propshaft problem that sidelined Esapekka Lappi from both shakedown and the rally itself on Safari Rally Kenya has existed since January 2022, DirtFish can reveal.
Lappi was running third overall halfway through Saturday on his first ever Safari, but pulled off the second pass of the Soysambu stage when the propshaft in his i20 N Rally1 failed.
The same issue had twice prevented the Finn from completing a competitive run of the shakedown stage on Wednesday.
A new propshaft was fitted to Lappi’s car before the rally began on Thursday.
Lappi hasn’t faced the media since he retired, but his team-mate Thierry Neuville was asked by DirtFish if Lappi’s triple propshaft failure worried him, and revealed: “It’s [been] worrying me since Monte Carlo last year, but somehow we get through.”
Hyundai started the Rally1 rule cycle on the back foot in 2022, but has since recovered to win six events and become a firm contender for both the drivers’ and manufacturers’ championships.
But it appears the propshaft remains a weakness of Hyundai’s first-ever hybrid rally car.
Hyundai team principal Cyril Abiteboul revealed to DirtFish that Neuville’s car suffered the same problem in testing “a good while ago”, backing up his driver’s comments that the part is an underlying problem.
Asked what had been done to address the problem, Abiteboul said: “I think we’ve tried to convince ourselves that the issue was addressed, and clearly it’s not.
“Frankly I think there are a number of things which are not perfect in our team, otherwise there would not be a new team principal, there would not be a new team technical director that there was not before.
“And one of the mandates we were given, one of the targets that we have, again is to fix this sort of issue. It’s something we will do now in a very focused manner.”
Abiteboul made it clear that it was purely coincidental that it was only Lappi’s car that had suffered the failures in Kenya.
“Frankly if we understood everything about this part we would probably not be talking about it tonight so I need to have some humility in what I can explain, but we have no reason to believe that there is anything specific to Esapekka,” he said.
“He has the same car, he’s got the same hardware, got the same software, he’s driving extremely well. There is nothing wrong with his driving, there is no sort of overlapping or anything else so we have no explanation to give as to why the three incidents have been focused on Esapekka’s car.
“That’s one of the things that maybe we need to understand looking a bit more into the detail when we are back in the factory, but there shouldn’t be any reason for that.”
Abiteboul also admitted that the “containment measure” Hyundai introduced after Lappi’s problems on shakedown “was not sufficient”.
He explained: “We knew that there was a risk, this was as much as we could do at the rally here in Kenya.
“With the support of the factory we tried to introduce some containment measure but it’s very clear that it was not enough.
“So we need to do better.
“I can regret not having addressing the situation more seriously in the last couple of months but I am not a technical director.
“As a TP, the first thing that I wanted to do that I have done is to make sure that we have a technical director who is capable of cutting the crap and making sure that this problem, like the few other problems that we had on the car, is and will be sorted as soon as possible.”
Abiteboul denied speculation that the propshaft had been changed in specification since the start of last season. He also poured cold water on talk that Lappi was using a lighter weight part.
