As the last manufacturer to get a final Rally1 prototype built and tested, Hyundai was not widely expected to be on the pace of its World Rally Championship rivals on the Monte Carlo Rally.
Broadly speaking that’s proven to be true as Sébastiens Loeb and Ogier fought for victory throughout Friday, driving a Ford Puma and Toyota GR Yaris respectively.
But despite a tricky start to the rally – where Thierry Neuville was the best Hyundai in sixth place after Thursday’s night stages – Hyundai’s pace began to improve midway through the second day of action.
While there wasn’t a singular factor that contributed to Neuville’s rise to best-of-the-rest in fourth place, some fine-tuning has helped cut the pace deficit, especially after registering a pair of top-three times on the last two Friday morning stages.
“It’s a bit of a combination,” Neuville told DirtFish at the midday tire fitting zone when asked whether stage conditions or set-up improvements were responsible for the upturn in pace.
“We had a lot of changes [from] yesterday to today because we had some issues with the gearbox and for safety reasons, we changed it overnight, as well as the rear diff.
“[I tried] different settings, it wasn’t working at all this morning. I worked a bit on the pre-load between the two [first Friday] runs, to increase a lot the pre-load to get more locking and less surprises.
“We made a good change on the front suspension in the chassis, which started to work from the two last [morning] stages, but we are far off from being comfortable in the car.”
Neuville holds fourth place after the first full day of stages but he remains under pressure from both his own team-mate Ott Tänak and M-Sport’s Craig Breen, the trio separated by only 11.4s.
His task of keeping them at bay won’t get any easier as the weekend wears on either, as Neuville admitted that he’d likely reached the limit of what the i20 was capable of with its Monte set-up.
“I think we’re gonna struggle to get there this weekend,” he conceded. “I’m more or less on the limit of what I can do with what we have for the weekend.
“I tried to go stiffer and stiffer on the chassis but I’m on the maximum now so there’s not much we can do. We have to fight with it. We will try some different things tomorrow on the geometry.”
A much tougher day befell Oliver Solberg, who is competing on the Monte in a top-level machine for the first time.
Smoke poured into the cockpit of his i20 while waiting at the start line of several stages during Friday, plus he had trouble hearing co-driver Elliot Edmondson’s pacenotes being delivered on Thursday’s night stages.
“I feel it in my lungs, I hurt in my chest at the moment, so it’s not so nice. Before every stage there’s a lot of smoke coming in when we stand still and basically, we start crying,” Solberg explained to DirtFish.
“You get dizzy before the start and you lose totally the concentration. I struggled!”
Solberg is currently last of the Rally1 runners in 10th but continued to battle Toyota’s Kalle Rovanperä during Friday afternoon, who ended the day 10.1s up the road in ninth.
Tänak meanwhile ran into problems with his hybrid unit in the morning – an issue that also afflicted Neuville on the day’s penultimate test – but was pleased to have found some consistency in the afternoon loop.
