On the second special stage of the rally, the nearly 24-kilometre-long Esclangon test, the gap to team-mate Oliver Solberg’s fastest time grew to well over a minute. Ogier, who was also the first car on the road on Friday morning, took a heavy hit again, and there was no way back from that.
In the end, Ogier, who finished third overall in the rally, delivered harsh criticism of Hankook’s winter tyres on Thursday evening.
“I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. Absolutely unbelievably shitty tyres,” Ogier fumed.
The head of the Korean tyre manufacturer’s motorsport division, Steven Cho, has responded to Ogier’s criticism on the Dirtfish website.
“Honestly it was hard to hear a nine-time champion say that about your tires, but you know we’re here in motorsport, everyone is pushing and putting themselves on the line to do the best job they can,” Cho begins on the rally website.
Cho openly admits that the performance of the studded winter tyre is not currently at its best.
“It’s clear that the performance of the tire is suboptimal here. We’ve had many, many years of mild Monte Carlos and this is much more snow and slush than we had expected,” Cho sums up.
“We knew feedback from last year – and some of the feedback directly from Sébastien as well – was that if there’s a lot of snow and slush, it’s going to be trouble. We were sort of hoping the weather wouldn’t turn this way.”
During the rally, teams asked the FIA for permission to cut the tyre and its tread to make it work better in snow and slush. According to Cho, modifications had already been made to the tyre in advance, but the extremely wintry conditions came as a surprise to everyone.
“We did some modifications to the tire. But actually, we worked with the FIA in advance of coming here. We did modify the tread, so we did actually add more grooves. We did it in advance of pre-event testing and so all of the teams and drivers will have had ample opportunity to know what they’re running. It just wasn’t quite enough because the snowfall was unprecedentedly a lot,” Cho explains.
“I think allowing cutting for each individual team opens up a whole Pandora’s box that we or the FIA don’t want to go down. There are implications.”
