Hyundai’s sporting director Andrew Wheatley has offered more insight into the driver strategy the Korean firm is deploying in this year’s World Rally Championship.
Ott Tänak’s departure from a factory i20 N Rally1 forced Hyundai into a re-think for 2026 – with Esapekka Lappi, Hayden Paddon and Dani Sordo selected as the three drivers who will rotate the third seat through this season.
Lappi starts his second consecutive outing aboard the works car in Safari, having finished Sweden a strong sixth last month. Monte Carlo starter Paddon will be back in the car for Croatia, with Sordo making his season debut in the Canaries.
Wheatley told DirtFish: “You look at drivers like EP [Lappi] and they have specific events where they have, let’s say, maybe not even a performance number, it’s a confidence number and it’s an expectation number which shows where they are at their best.
“And then there’s some events where you look and think, ‘OK, who is the best person for that event?’ We don’t necessarily have the best person for that event. So who is the best opportunity that we have?
“We have a calculation on one side of what is the potential performance of each driver on each event and on the other side we have a target of how many points we need to score on that event. And so, what we’re trying to do is correlate the two of them to come up with the best jigsaw for what we need to achieve.”
Sordo’s program is expected to extend to Portugal, Greece and Sardinia, with Lappi set to return to a home round he’s won before and the similarly fast gravel across the water in Estonia.
Paddon’s asphalt-biased timetable, with him expected in Japan as well as Croatia, is the one which raised eyebrows.
“I think Hayden’s not going to be exclusively Tarmac, but it is definitely towards Tarmac,” said Wheatley. “And I think it’s all about the individual event. Obviously, I can’t tell you exactly what the program is, because it could be variable, it could move, it has some flexibility in the program. And it depends a little bit on the driver’s feeling.
“There was a very clear desire early in the program for Hayden to be part of the package because he is the consummate professional. There was a discussion and a thorough investigation of some of the other championship events he’s done and some of the other events he’d done. And there was a couple that stood out for me, and they were Ceredigion, Ypres and Donegal. They are all tricky, natural events where local drivers normally do quite well.”
Paddon's Tarmac performances in a Rally2 car proved his ability on a sealed surface to Hyundai
Paddon won in Wales in 2024, finished second in Ypres last year and was on the pace before crashing out of his Donegal debut.
Wheatley added: “We want to give the drivers the opportunity to give them the best. Hayden is in a slightly different place – he is supporting the team in some of the events that don’t necessarily fit the other drivers as well. And we think that we’ve got a reasonable balance over the year. But there’s reasonable flexibility.
“What we want is the drivers raring to go, ready to go, thinking with a positive frame of mind that they can do a good job here. That, I think, is worth as much as reputation or history.”
