Arch-rival Toyota collected an impressive 11 victories during the season, while Hyundai had to settle for two wins. Ott Tänak triumphed in Greece in June and Thierry Neuville at the end of the season in Saudi Arabia.
Hyundai’s drop in performance was significant, as only last year the team fought until the end for both the drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles. Neuville ultimately claimed the drivers’ crown, but on the final day of the season finale Ott Tänak went off the road, which cost Hyundai the manufacturers’ championship.
“It feels good. Victory has been close on several occasions. But between a victory that is close and an actual victory, there is a world of difference,” says the President of Hyundai Motorsport, Cyril Abiteboul to the Belgian channel RTBF.
“Until the end, we were extremely tense — a tension that shows we do not have confidence in ourselves after a season that hurt us, after a season that had done us a lot of good. There are therefore many things to learn and to do during the seven weeks that separate us from the start of the Rallye Monte Carlo.”
Over the past year, Hyundai has increasingly turned its attention towards circuit racing series. However, that does not mean they do not also want success on the rally side. At some point in the design of this season’s car, things nevertheless went badly wrong. For example, during the season Tänak opted to use last year’s version of Hyundai’s Rally1 car for an asphalt rally.
“When I joined the team in 2023, we gave the impression of being dominated by Toyota. At that moment, we decided to completely redo the car. In 2024, we still have this 2023 car and we give the impression of domination. Which shows that we were capable of winning rallies and championships with this car,” Abiteboul sums up.
“But we were already very committed to the process of the 2025 car, which we could not really disengage from. And this year, indeed, we give the impression of being dominated by Toyota. You always have to be careful with stories of domination.”
According to Abiteboul, last season may also have given a misleading impression of the balance of power. Some of Hyundai’s victories came with a touch of luck.
“Sometimes you have the season you deserve, sometimes you have the season you do not completely deserve. Last year’s victories were deserved, but I think it was a bit flattering to think we were dominant compared to Toyota, who also made many mistakes last year. Mistakes that perhaps made things easier for us and perhaps led us not to ask ourselves the right questions,” Abiteboul tells.
“Then we spent a winter finally working on this new car. And we did not work on three new elements that appeared: the end of the hybrid, the change of tyres and the change of fuel. All our efforts, our focus, our test days and our jokers went into this new car and not into these three elements, which changed things quite a lot and penalised us in the end. We arrived in Monte Carlo not at all prepared for how the Hankooks work on tarmac because we had been working on other things”
