M-Sport team principal Richard Millener admits M-Sport made a mistake with its tire pressures on Friday morning at Rally Sweden.
All three Puma Rally1s suffered punctures across SS2-4, with Mãrtiņš Sesks losing over seven minutes on the day’s first test as he changed both front tires.
Team-mate Josh McErlean then lost both of his rears on the next stage after landing over a jump, while Jon Armstrong had a front-left puncture on SS2.
Millener confessed the team “made a bit of an error” in its tactics for the first three forest stages.
“What you see on the TV is that it’s only really our cars that are having this problem, so I think we have to investigate that,” Millener said.
“Obviously, we did a lot of work on tire pressures and set-ups on the test and we had a good, reliable set-up that we brought into the rally, but something is obviously different here, whether the road conditions are different or the speed, the compressions quite possibly are causing problems, but it seems that I think we have to own up and honestly say that we may well have made a bit of an error here in what we’ve been doing and it’s cost us dearly this morning, which is a real shame.
Millener was open and honest with his comments
“We have an engineering team working very hard to find the balance between running the optimum pressure for performance versus reliability,” Millener added. “And like I say, we had a successful test, so it was a little surprise for us to see what’s going on today, but clearly we need to make a few changes.”
Asked if the pressures were too low or if it was just bad luck, Millener thought “it’s probably a little bit of both” but added what happened was not in-line with M-Sport “trying to get the guys experience and build the pace up over the rally”.
He said: “We need to step back and make sure we’re not going to see this problem through the rest of the rally because it’s already hurt us dearly. If we’ve made a mistake then we have to put our hands up for that, but like you say, we’re trying to find that optimum window.
“Everybody’s still tweaking these tires to get the best from them and really we don’t have a huge amount of time through the year to prepare for this rally. It’s one rally, one specialized rally, one specialized tire, so we’re doing everything we can in a small window.
“We didn’t do any pre-event rallies like some of the other teams did. We just did one test day each. Similar conditions, similar temperatures, but like I say, you can only test on a certain amount of roads.
“And then when it comes to a rally, it’s very different in how the road cuts up and how the road is in the characteristics. So, yeah, a hard lesson this morning, but we’re trying to make the best of a difficult situation now.”
