The 2019 world champion and WRC star driver Ott Tänak dropped a major bombshell after the season. The Estonian announced that he would be stepping away from the World Rally Championship – at least for the time being.
Tänak’s decision triggered a major process within the Hyundai team. The team had to find a replacement for Tänak.
In the end, the team settled on a solution whereby it will run a total of three drivers next season, rotating them in the team’s third car at selected rallies. Esapekka Lappi, Dani Sordo and Hayden Paddon form a fairly experienced “stand-in service”.
However, Hyundai had as many as 35 drivers on the list from which the selections were made, reveals the team’s technical director Andrew Wheatley to rally website DirtFish.
“Obviously this was not an easy decision,” Wheatley said.
“We’d spent a lot of time talking and thinking about it and we put data around it, as you’d expect. I produced a database, a spreadsheet of results with detail of how those results correlate with other results, including mechanical issues, the number of punctures, the number of other issues and other factors – this produced what was, effectively, a performance number for each driver on each event,” Wheatley revealed.
According to Wheatley, the team carefully examined the different driver options and gave them a score based on results and how well they would integrate into the team.
“We reviewed every potential option coming out of Rally2 cars – that’s all the drivers that have shown real pace in Rally2, and there’s a number of them, there’s a lot of drivers. When you start digging down into the data, my database had something like 35 drivers. There were plenty with good standout performances,” Wheatley explained.
In the end, Hyundai decided to prioritise experience. According to Wheatley, there was a good and entirely understandable reason for this.
“But when you say to those drivers: ‘OK, let’s go to Monte Carlo, and I don’t want you to finish first, second, or third. I want you to be fourth or fifth, possibly sixth.’ That’s a really difficult thing to set a driver [who doesn’t have experience]. And for their first time in a Rally1 car with limited testing, it’s nigh on impossible,” Wheatley pointed out.
Hyundai wanted to play it safe. The aforementioned trio did not compete in the World Rally Championship last year, but each of them nevertheless drove at a high level throughout the year. That ultimately tipped the balance in their favour.
“This decision was less about how far you can kick the ball and more about how often you drop it. Esapekka [Lappi], Hayden [Paddon] and Dani [Sordo] all won a national title in 2025 – we know they’re match fit,” the Hyundai boss stated.
