When Dani Sordo rocked up to the Central European Rally late this season, it got tongues wagging. With Andreas Mikkelsen in the third Hyundai, he wasn’t there to get in a car and drive. Instead, he spent a lot of time in the orbit of team management.
There emerged a possibility that he might head towards a desk job of sorts. Not taking the reins, but maybe a single rein, helping to steer Hyundai’s WRC efforts given team principal Cyril Abiteboul and technical director Francois-Xavier Demaison’s new distraction of the upcoming Genesis World Endurance Championship program.
Sordo is hardly work-shy. Every year he rolls up his sleeves to make sure the family Circuito LaRoca venue is ready to host a post-season celebration of everything rally. But he has a confession to make about his taste of being behind the scenes instead of behind the wheel.
“I was very bored,” he told DirtFish.
“If I can only take coffees there, I’m not interested. I would like to work – cleaning or whatever! But to only wake up and go there and used for nothing…
“I will not go only for money. If they pay you and you don’t do nothing… I like to do things and push. If you go to the rally and you feel like you are just there because you are Dani Sordo…”
Sordo is at the tail-end of his career as a professional rally driver. A part-timer since the 2018 season, he was selected for only three rallies by Hyundai’s management in 2024, with Andreas Mikkelsen preferred on asphalt and Esapekka Lappi taking the majority of fast gravel events.
But he hasn’t given up hope of being involved in Hyundai’s driver lineup next year. Despite Adrien Fourmaux being hired as a full-time replacement for the third points-scoring car, Sordo still believes there’s a place for a fourth i20 N Rally1 in the team’s lineup – and that he should be in it.
“I think it would be good for the team to put in [a fourth car], because when you see the line-up of other teams, they are all like this, four drivers,” he said, in reference to Toyota’s lineup of Kalle Rovanperä, Elfyn Evans, Takamoto Katsuta and Sami Pajari. “But I’m not the boss of the team, only an employee, so I can’t decide.
“Of course, I would like to drive a few rallies and I think I can do a good job for the team. But even if I don’t drive this fourth car, I think it will be important to have it because with the strategy now, at the moment they have the starting position, it’s nice to have at least one car at the back. If you are playing with the three cars all the time, you will have the three cars all the time at the front [of the road order].”
It may seem logical that if a Rally1 drive is not in the offing, a management role is the next-best thing – a choice Jari-Matti Latvala faced when he was offered the Toyota team principal role at the end of 2020.
Sordo has been linked to a role similar to that of Jari-Matti Latvala at Toyota
But Sordo indicated he’d rather drop down a level and drive for Hyundai elsewhere in rallying than hang up his helmet.
“If I have the opportunity to drive, I will do it,” he said. “And if not, I will try to drive in other categories because I feel like I can do something with the team, to help the team.
“If I can do whatever I want, I will not go there only to make interviews and to follow instructions. I would like to make my decisions, to do my things and not be there only for the picture.”
