Toyota will run its new engine aboard the Yaris WRC for the first time at Rally Portugal later this month.
The engine – the first to be designed and constructed entirely within Toyota’s Cologne facility – will focus more on out and out power rather than torque.
Team principal Jari-Matti Latvala said: “[The] new engine is coming to Portugal. We have the engine ready, but it was a little bit complicated to use it in Croatia because of the logistics.”
The team’s technical director Tom Fowler added more detail, telling DirtFish: “We’ve had the engine done for a while and, because it’s an improvement on the old engine, we wanted to use it as quickly as possible. We thought about Croatia, but Portugal was more straightforward.
“The engine definitely has more horsepower – that might sound strange, but it’s not always the case with our upgrades; we’ve done torque-based upgrades in the past. Like we talked about before a significant development – even if it’s not a traditional development – is to have the car manufactured completely in our own facility now.”
Fowler added that there were also improvements on the reliability side.
“We’ve addressed some skeletons which were lurking,” he said, although he wouldn’t be drawn on whether this included the cylinder issue which caused Sébastien Ogier’s retirement from Turkey last year.
While the new engine didn’t make it to Croatia, revised front-end aero did.
Latvala added: “We had the aero changed on the front wings – we have little spoilers there. We try to improve the stability on the front in the high-speed places, just to get more turning. There was a little bit lacking in some situations, we’re talking very small things, but this was an area to improve.”
M-Sport Ford has also recently introduced a new engine, debuting its latest evolution on last month’s Rally Croatia.
