The opening stage of Safari Rally Kenya was responsible for Hyundai’s overheating issue on the second which affected all three cars.
All three i20 N Rally1s – driven by Thierry Neuville, Adrien Fourmaux and Esapekka Lappi – slowed towards the end of SS2 Mzabibu with temperatures climbing within the engine bay.
The event’s first stage, Camp Moran, had been more of a swamp than a rally stage as sudden rainfall made conditions treacherous.
“It beats everything I’ve seen so far, honestly, in terms of muddy and tricky conditions,” remarked 2024 world champion Neuville.
Rally stage? Or swamp?
However the knock-on effect was each Hyundai had mud in its engine bay, and despite efforts to clear it they all suffered with high temperatures towards the end of SS2 – as did M-Sport’s Josh McErlean.
Neuville told DirtFish: ” I was trying desperately to clean the radiator before the last stage, brushing it and blowing and doing everything I could, but it’s full of mud, the air is not going through, and then, yeah, obviously, temperatures increased very quickly.
“Hopefully the temperature didn’t go too far up. But yeah, obviously not great.”
Hyundai sporting director Andrew Wheatley added: “I think sometimes when it doesn’t go well, it comes in threes. We had two, are were just waiting for the third now!
“But yeah, the first stage was… the rain came pretty late. We understood the stage would be a challenge, but it was pretty exceptional. And then the second stage it looks like we have a lot of mud in the radiator.
“[It went] straight through the front grille, so the whole of the engine bay has been full of mud.”
Asked why that wasn’t something Hyundai was able to anticipate ahead of the event, Wheatley replied: “We tested for this rally specifically in a lot of those conditions and didnt’t have the problem. I think the challenge is maybe… we need to wait and see. Let’s wait and see what the issue is.”
Teams are not allowed to test on-location for non-European rounds of the championship, meaning Hyundai’s pre-event tests for Kenya were held at its permanent test site in the south of France.
