Thierry Neuville, Kalle Rovanperä, Ott Tänak, Elfyn Evans, maybe even Adrien Fourmaux?
We know the battle to become the 2025 World Rally drivers’ champion is going to be as captivating as ever, but with 2024 still fresh in the memory we equally know to expect a thriller in the manufacturers’ race, too.
After that breathless powerstage finale in Japan, Toyota ended up victorious by just three points over Hyundai. Both are desperate to win this year, although probably in a less stressful manner!
So who has the advantage?
Hyundai has certainly bolstered its cavalry with the acquisition of Adrien Fourmaux. As a lineup, Esapekka Lappi, Dani Sordo and Andreas Mikkelsen – sharing a third car alongside title chasers Neuville and Tänak – looked mighty this time last year. After all, all five are World Rally winners.
But Hyundai Motorsport president and team principal Cyril Abiteboul was quick to admit that, tactically, the team got it wrong. None of the drivers were in the car enough to make a real impact.
Could Hyundai be left behind strategically? It's already locked in to a single strategy for the year ahead
Fourmaux’s presence is a direct response to that. The Frenchman was a real star of 2024 for M-Sport, and will contest all 14 rounds for Hyundai – marking a clear shift in strategy for the team which has been famed for using part-time drivers. At the time of writing, Hyundai has made no comment on whether it may implement any throughout the year.
That could be key in its chess game with Toyota.
In this writer’s opinion, Hyundai’s suite of full-time drivers is marginally stronger than Toyota’s. Rovanperä needs no introduction and Elfyn Evans is a serial points scorer, but Takamoto Katsuta probably has more weaknesses to address than Fourmaux.
However Toyota isn’t just running three cars in 2024. It’s running four. Sometimes – like this week in Monte Carlo – it’s running five.
World champion Thierry Neuville is aware of the threat this poses to his Hyundai team.
“I mean, it’s very hard to know what’s the right move [in terms of full or part-time drivers], but I think that we have a strong drivers’ line-up and with three full-time drivers, we have good chances to bring home good results and strong points,” Neuville told DirtFish.
“But now fighting against four to five Toyotas will be an additional challenge. So let’s see. I mean, there will be a bit of strategy as well at some point from their side, because they can.
“For our side, we will have less strategy because, basically, we can’t.”
Hyundai is locked in and, to an extent, appears to be playing 2025 with a straight bat. Toyota meanwhile has opened itself up to more tactical ploys – an intriguing 180 on how the battlefield lay only a matter of years ago.
Sébastien Ogier is Toyota’s strongest ace card, and not just because he’s an eight-time world champion and the winner of 61 world rallies. Ogier can be Toyota’s disruptor.
Likely to appear on around seven events, Ogier will intermittently boost Tooyta’s manufacturers’ cause wherever he drives given his prowess and, assumingly, his good starting position without too high a place in the drivers’ championship.
Hyundai can of course counteract this move by running part-time drivers of its own, but even if it does, with all due respect to that driver they’re not going to be quite as skilled as Ogier.
Where Toyota seems to have absolutely given itself an advantage, though, is through Sami Pajari.
Over to Neuville once more: “I think it’s going to be tougher to stay in the front of the championship for the whole season because we also see Toyota with five cars and two official teams entering, so they’re going to take a lot of manufacturers’ points with that and it will make it… yeah, different.”
Toyota is not obligated to create a new team to run Pajari for a full 2025 season. The Finn could have just been a non-points scorer, yet instead he will compete for the all-new Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT2 entity.
It’s worth pointing out this isn’t the first time Toyota has done this, as it formed Toyota Gazoo Racing NG for Katsuta back in 2022.
But what this does is offer the potential for Pajari to still help Toyota’s main manufacturers’ championship bid, even if he won’t be scoring points directly for it. Competing for his own team means he is still a direct rival of Hyundai, and as Neuville alluded to Pajari can therefore take points away from Hyundai.
A second team also offers flexibility from within, where drivers could be shuffled between the two depending on their expected performance at each event. Although interestingly, Katsuta has not been nominated for either outfit at this week’s Monte Carlo Rally.
The conclusion, however, is obvious. While Hyundai has a very clear plan of attack, Toyota’s is far less predictable with far more different strategies at its disposal.
In a battle that’s expected to be super close again this year, could that prove to be the difference?