For Sunday after Sunday early last year, Toyota watched as Hyundai reeled it in across the final day of a World Rally Championship round. On the evidence of last week’s Rally Islas Canarias, those days are gone.
Toyota has ditched its conservative approach to on-event car development – a key factor in its domination of Sunday’s bonus points in Las Palmas.
“We didn’t know what to expect going there,” Toyota technical director Tom Fowler told DirtFish. “We’d done our work with the car and with the tire, we’d done our testing – but we’d tested against ourselves.
“We didn’t have any idea of what that the performance level would be and we were nervous as normal. How’s the first stage times going to be? It was a step into the unknown. And that was the first shock that, you know, we were so competitive compared to the others.”
There’s nothing new in the factory Toyotas being quick out of the blocks. The strategy change is all about Sunday.
“We had this exact discussion after shakedown and then after the first morning of stages in Gran Canaria,” continued Fowler. “We’ve gone to events and we’ve been doing well in the first stages and then Hyundai has worked on their set-up during the rally and come Sunday we’ve struggled to win the powerstage against them – when on Friday we beat them convincingly, we said: ‘Let’s not be in that situation.’
“Our mindset was that we had to take everything we could, because they’re normally good at coming back, but this time they couldn’t come back.
“We changed our strategy on this during last year. Historically, we were much more conservative with the development of set-up during events. We would find a level we felt was good enough to win and then not risk changing it – Hyundai felt like they worked the opposite way around and got quicker as the event progressed.
“We could see early on that our car was quicker in the twisty, more slippery stages – but that time gap was maintained even when there were less of those roads as the event progressed. Being able to keep building that gap [to Hyundai] was pretty surprising for us, to be honest.”
