Monte Carlo Rally: behind the scenes

PH joins all-new Hyundai team on the Monte ... just as both its cars retire. Awkward.

It was with no little fanfare that Hyundai announced its arrival in the World Rally Championship at last week’s Monte Carlo Rally. With the Alzenau-based works team making its competitive debut at the season opener, a vast symbol of Hyundai’s inexhaustible ambition stood proud in the Gap service park; a giant hospitality edifice, quite unlike anything I’ve seen in the WRC before. Several tennis courts in length with two storeys, it requires four days to erect and seven trucks to ferry it around the globe. To leave guests in no doubt that this team means business, the password for the wifi is ‘inittowinit’.

Team principal Nandan; face says it all

Hyundai had also invited media guests from around the globe, PH included, to witness its pair of i20 WRC machines tackle one of the most punishing rallies of the year. As the executives from Korea dined on the finest food in the service park on Thursday evening whilst surrounded by excitable journalists, they might have been the proudest men in all of France … but for the inconvenient fact that neither of their cars had survived the first day of the rally.

'Watch this...'
It was the exact reverse of a plucky, humble privateer team sticking it to the big-budget factory squads. Might Hyundai have been better advised to arrive modestly, to make as little fuss as possible as the team gets up to speed on what it outwardly considers to be a learning year? Perhaps. If any of the senior team personnel felt any embarrassment at having made so much noise and not having a single car running beyond the fourth special stage, they hid it well.

Hyundai's presence underlines backing for operation

The team’s big money signing, Thierry Neuville, had thrown his i20 at a telegraph pole and into retirement before I’d even left for the airport early on Thursday evening. Dani Sordo’s rally came to an end less than an hour after we landed in chilly Marseille having caught an electronic cold (one that, to the frustration of the team’s engineers, was cured with a simple remedy just moments after it was too late). A quirk of this event is that competitors are not allowed to restart the following day. Game over. So it was that I went to the Monte Carlo Rally and came home able to tell you precisely nothing about how the i20 WRC looks on stage.

Without any tactics to discuss, any tricky tyre choices to be made or any recce footage to be pored over at the last minute, the ignominious double retirement did at least mean that the team’s drivers and engineers were on hand to answer as many questions as I could fire at them. The trip was, at least, a good opportunity to learn about Hyundai’s ambitions and motivations as a competitor in the WRC.

Neuville was fast out of blocks, perhaps too fast

Hot shoe
In Neuville, Hyundai has bagged the brightest young talent in rallying. The 25-year-old Belgian was the star of the 2013 season, after runaway title winner SébastienOgier, and he’s been justly rewarded with a lucrative works drive on a long-term contract. These young motorsport professionals are so impressive; within a few hours of binning his rally car just nine kilometres into the very first stage, having undone all of the good work of a dozen mechanics and engineers, the lad was unflinching. With that ability to compartmentalise, his off on the Monte won’t affect him one little bit.

“There was ice from the first corner,” he explains. “We went off nine kilometres in. It was a very quick corner. I turned in probably a bit too quickly and the front wheels lost traction.

Neuville was able to write off his write off

“It’s not difficult to face up to the team afterwards. I feel very sorry for the mechanics because they have worked hard for the last few weeks, [but] now we have to forget. It’s our job. If you start to think too much about it you will never get back into the rhythm. It’s done. Look forward to the next one.”

For all his mental strength and driving ability, it must be said that Neuville’s mistake on the Monte was a grave one. The split times showed that he broke the first timing beam, just a few kilometres into the stage, more than four seconds sooner than did eventual rally winner Ogier. This says nothing about the pace of the i20; it simply shows that Neuville was going harder than his rivals and harder, too, than was appropriate for the conditions.

To finish first...
Now, in four starts, he hasn’t once reached the end of this rally. With ambitions to challenge for the title in 2015, his lack of experience of this demanding and specialised event will effectively put him on the back foot before next season even starts. Neuville’s own interests aside, his early retirement from this event also cost a young team an entire rally’s worth of learning, all in a year in which results and fast stage times are significantly less important than competitive mileage.

Sordo got more stage miles under i20's belt

So that it didn’t all count for nothing, the team will be keen to find whatever positives they can from an unrewarding debut outing. Before his car developed its temporary malady, Spaniard Sordo, a part-time competitor for Hyundai in 2014, had held a fine third position. The leader board was muddled due to the unpredictable conditions and the resultant tyre lottery, though, and once the weather had settled a little, as it did later in the event, the natural order of things would also have settled and Sordo would have inevitably slipped towards the lower part of the top 10, had he been able to continue. The team has, after all, completed just a few thousand development kilometres with the i20 having made its competitive debut barely a year after announcing its intention to enter the series.

Team principal Michel Nandan is pragmatic. “What is positive,” he says, “is that the system we have implemented to get weather information and road information was not too bad because each time we had the right tyre choice. This is positive for us.”

Rallying, as ever, takes no prisoners

No mucking about
It may seem like a minor point, but it speaks volumes about the patient and mature approach Hyundai is taking to this debut season, to its learning year, despite rather rushing into the series. An alternative to entering the championship this term would have been to target a 2015 entry, do as much development work as possible during 2014 without the constraints of the regulation 42 test days per year and join the fray with an awful lot more than the rather meagre 55 days and 6,900km of testing that the squad had actually accrued prior to the Monte Carlo Rally.

Team manager Alain Penasse is quick to point out the reasons for, and benefits of, entering the championship this year. “It has a lot to do with the Korean attitude. Sometimes it takes them long to make a decision, but the day they make the decision everything is turbocharged. It took them a few years to decide that they wanted to [enter the WRC] and from the moment they said ‘yes’ they wanted it as soon as possible. They didn’t mind to do a test year in front of the public.

Scale of portable HQ underlines investment

“We have put mechanics and engineers from lots of different disciplines together and they have to get used to each other. For that, this year will be very useful.” The arena of competition, as both Penasse and Nandan point out, is the best place in which to learn to be competitive.

Looking ahead
We’ll follow Hyundai’s progress with much interest this season, but also will we keep our expectations in check, just as the team itself is doing; being in a position to challenge for podiums by the end of the year is as ambitious as it is allowing itself to be at this early stage.

Despite a spectacularly inauspicious start to the season, one can judge with some confidence that, for Hyundai, everything is in place. In Nandan it has a leader with patience, expertise and many years of frontline WRC experience. In Neuville is has the only driver in the service park who seems capable of challenging the mighty Ogier. In budgetary terms, it appears to be well resourced. In 2014 it has many months and 12 further rallies to refine its car and the team as a whole to a point of competitiveness. In 2015 it has the potential, I have been convinced, to win rallies.

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