With 11 rounds completed, Hyundai have only a single rally win to their name. Toyota, by contrast, have ten victories on the board.
Toyota have been so dominant this year that they could wrap up the manufacturers’ title at the Central European Rally in two weeks’ time.
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But Hyundai have not thrown in the towel. Nor can they afford to. The team is confirmed to be in the World Rally Championship next season, and it cannot allow Toyota any more head start in development.
Hyundai drivers have been hard at work with tests and test rallies before the Central European Rally on asphalt, but the long dithering over the team’s future has taken its toll. Hyundai only confirmed at the end of July that the works team will be in the WRC in 2026.
“We’ve seen how much Toyota is ahead of us this season. We are paying today for the four months of uncertainty that reigned at Hyundai regarding the future of the WRC programme,” reigning world champion Thierry Neuville snapped, according to Belgian daily La Dernière Heure.
“Four months cannot be made up at this level! Right now we would need 40 extra people to have any hope of competing with our rivals,” he blasted.
In the previous round in the Canaries, Hyundai were completely at sea. Toyota’s drivers dominated the event and took a 1-2-3-4.
Now, ahead of the Central European Rally, Hyundai are preparing more thoroughly. Neuville contested a test rally last weekend in his home region in Belgium, and his team-mate Adrien Fourmaux will also enter two smaller rallies in test mode before the WRC round.
Neuville was left satisfied with his own test rally.
“We had every condition between shakedown and the rally. That allowed us to try quite a few things. It’s impossible to say where our performance level stands, because even though I felt comfortable in the car, we would have needed a Toyota at the start to compare our pace,” Neuville said.
Of Hyundai’s drivers, Ott Tänak completed a single test day in Belgium, during which he compared the team’s latest Rally1 version with last year’s car. The French driver Fourmaux suggested that Hyundai is not planning to use the 2024 car at the Central European Rally, the one with which Tänak won the same event a year ago.
Neuville was on the same page with Fourmaux.
“We’ll carry out further testing in Croatia, because Adrien Fourmaux will be competing there in the ERC round. But I don’t think going back to the 2024 Hyundai is the solution,” Neuville concluded.
