The deputy team principal of Hyundai Motorsport, Julien Moncet, reveals that his team will bring some upgrades to Hyundai i20N Rally1 at Rally Portugal while there will be some improvements to the car in Sweden as response to the reliability issues of Rallye Monte Carlo.
In Monte Carlo, Ott Tanak and Oliver Solberg were forced to retire from the event due to engine and to exhaust issues respectively, so only Thierry Neuville got to the finish line of the first WRC round.
However, Neuville faced some issues with his car as well which led him to drop time in stages as he lost the brakes on Friday while the front right suspension of his car broke down on the second loop of Saturday.
"The process of adding reliability and more performance will take time", Moncet said.
"We will be able to see some improvement in Sweden but it’s a long process to get where we need to be.
"There will be quite a lot of time between Sweden and Croatia, and that will help us.
"But there are some things that we need homologation to be changed.
"There are two different levels: the parts we can change now because they are not homologated, so we see improvement in Sweden and Croatia, and then we will have to wait a bit more to do some further tuning where we need to homologate new parts.
"I would say that I hope to have a better picture in Portugal.
"We have a limited number of jokers so we can’t change everything.
"We are gathering all the new concepts and ideas and we’ll have to evaluate which ones are the best in terms of reliability first and performance.
"We will have to once again prioritize – we have more ideas than jokers.
"We have to go for the ones with the best potential.
"But we don’t know yet which exactly.
"We have five jokers on the chassis side, three on the engine side.
"On the engine, it is reduced because last year was really a lot.
"And we have some on the software electronics side.
"It’s quite a good number actually".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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