Esapekka Lappi will start this week’s Safari Rally Kenya without completing a single test run aboard his Hyundai i20 N Rally1.
Lappi suffered a double propshaft failure on Wednesday morning’s shakedown stage – a problem Hyundai team principal Cyril Abiteboul revealed the team also experienced in a previous test.
The Finn stopped twice on separate attempts at the stage.
Hyundai suffered issues with the propshaft at the inception of the i20 N Rally1 in 2022. DirtFish understood this had been fixed with the use of homologation jokers.
Abiteboul confirmed it was the prop which stopped the car, but admitted the team was still unsure of the cause of the issue. The i20 is being recovered to the service park in Naivasha where further investigations will be made.
“It happened in the test [as well],” Abiteboul told DirtFish. “It’s a part that is under scrutiny. It’s always a compromise: you want to be able to take the torque, but also you want to be on the minimum for the weight.
“If we are using that part, it’s because we are confident it is right. It happened very early on the shakedown and the life and the mileage of the part is not very high. Maybe the propshaft is a consequence rather than the cause of the stoppage.”
Asked if Lappi’s second issue was related, Abiteboul added: “It’s the same area of the car and that is what is leading me to think that the propshaft is maybe more of a consequence than the root cause of the issue.
“The good news is it’s only Wednesday. We have time to investigate properly and do the changes we need to do.”
Despite Lappi’s problems, Abiteboul remained optimistic about Hyundai’s chances of a maiden Safari win.
“Last year we came here and Kenya was maybe a little bit early for that car with the new regulation,” he said.
“The problems we had at the start of the season were still not totally behind us, but now we’re coming with much more mature cars and hopefully the reliability problems we had, we’re not going to encounter them again.”
Hyundai will be afforded more time than usual to look into the propshaft issue, courtesy of Safari Rally Kenya’s schedule which delivered shakedown a day ahead of most World Rally Championship rounds.
Thursday morning will be spent in transit to Nairobi for the ceremonial start and Kasarani superspecial south of Naivasha.
