Hyundai’s secrecy over its updated Rally1 car

Nobody's keen to share anything about what's new on the i20 next week, but Abiteboul did drop some hints

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I already knew the response I’d get before I asked the question, but it would be remiss not to try.

Details of Hyundai’s revised i20 N Rally1, which’ll debut at next week’s Rally Sweden, have deliberately been kept secret. Somehow, I had to try and get more detail.

But Thierry Neuville saw it coming.

“Good luck,” he said, with his trademark grin.

Sensing a dead-end on the horizon, I had to take another shot. Is suspension a key area of change?

“I don’t know what changes,” Neuville said, evidently lying. “It just drives better, hopefully.

“It will be a bit upgraded maybe, hopefully,” he carried on. “But no, I mean, good feeling so far with the few evolutions we have tested. Hopefully we can confirm that in the race.”

The FIA has homologated the changes – believed to primarily focus on suspension and transmission – but this level of secrecy does suggest that Hyundai has cooked up something it feels is special. You have to assume it’s proud of its efforts to go to this effort to conceal them from us, and most pertinently Toyota.

Ott Tänak stuck to the same script as Neuville, but was quick to remind me this isn’t strictly a new car.

“It’s the same car, it’s just some jokers used,” he said. “But hopefully a good direction, so it should help me.”

Can we deduce from that that it should be more to Tänak’s liking than previous Hyundais have been?

“I’m not sure we got everything, you know, we would have liked to, but I think quite a few things should be still, yes, compared to what we have so far,” he teased.

And what would he like from the car?

“More handling.”

Adrien Fourmaux was perhaps a bit more expansive than his team-mates, but again simply directed me to “the technical side” when I tried to push for details.

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Hyundai has spent a lot of development jokers on updating its Rally1 machine

But he did offer: “I tried it in December [and] it was really positive. So I was pleased to drive the car, I had a really good feeling, so let’s see how it works in competition.”

Hyundai Motorsport president and team principal Cyril Abiteboul did however give us something.

“Well, obviously I can’t give you all the details, but you will be able to look fairly quickly in the homologation papers. But what I can say is [it’s] obviously the biggest evolution since we introduced this new regulation of car, this new generation of car,” he said.

“So it’s a big step, in particular in the weakness that we had on the transmission, in general transmission package reliability. But also on the overall kinematics of the car to find more grip when we know that it’s tricky.

“We know that our car in particular was missing in a sort of smooth gravel, low grip condition, and it’s a big step.

“It’s a big step, so let’s see how it translates.”

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