Despite dominating the World Rally Championship season so far, Toyota remains wary of the threat posed by Hyundai, with technical director Tom Fowler admitting to being “nervous” for the remaining gravel events.
Toyota has displayed a clear pace advantage over Hyundai at the start of the campaign, and had Sebastien Ogier avoided a puncture in the closing stages of Rally Portugal, the Japanese brand would have most likely won the first six events of the year.
Ogier’s misfortune handed Hyundai and Thierry Neuville their first wins of the season in a rally that showed signs of a revival for the Korean marque on gravel. While the i20 N Rally1 has struggled to perform on tarmac and snow, it is known to be strong on gravel, and after next week’s final asphalt rally in Japan, the season will conclude with seven consecutive gravel rallies.
Knowing Hyundai’s capabilities on loose surfaces, and its performance in hot, rough gravel rallies, Toyota believes the season is far from over, and is refusing to let complacency creep in.
When asked how he was feeling ahead of the second half of the season on gravel, Fowler told Motorsport.com: “Nervous. I think there are different elements to it. I think Hyundai has been quite strong on gravel events in the past, particularly ones where we have always struggled in these mid-season hotter, more difficult rallies.
“Even if we have won, we haven’t won very easily, and we have been pushed really hard, and of course we didn’t win some of those events in the last couple of years. For sure, this car is good on those kind of events but the bit that makes this season particularly difficult is that there are no tarmac event intervals to allow you to catch up some points again.
“You are sitting there at the front of every gravel rally with teams behind you holding a chisel, and they are chiselling bits off you. It is going to be a case of can you not get chiselled all the way down before the season ends?
“If the season was laid out like it is with gravel rallies to the end and we continue to open the road with the first one, two, three or four cars as it is at the moment and if you kept doing gravel rallies forever you would get caught. It will be a case of can we stay ahead enough before getting caught towards the end of the season. It is an uncomfortable situation.”
Toyota has one joker up its sleeve
Rival Hyundai utilised all of its homologation jokers, the latest being deployed on engine upgrades in a bid to close the gap to Toyota, which still has one joker to play should it be required.
Fowler says the team already has some ideas how the joker could be used to bring more performance from its GR Yaris, but will only use it if the situation becomes critical.
“Essentially we have pretty much only one joker left and we have an unwritten rule that we keep a joker as an emergency thing as you never know what is going to happen,” added Fowler.
“We have one option still in stock to do something and we have some ideas. We have some pieces of performance we could bring with that joker, but at the moment we are not doing it because we want to keep one at least until summer to make sure there is nothing we need to do for the end of the year, that we have to do like some unknown reliability topic, or one of the performance topics becomes critical, for example.
“We have a number of things we could do with it [the joker], but as far as we see it at the moment they are all marginal, and until one of those becomes critical there is no point in playing it.”
Before the gravel season continues, Toyota will head to next week's Rally Japan as the overwhelming favourites to claim a sixth win of the year.
