Rally news
Suspension tweaks put Tanak and co on the front foot
Toyota says it has unlocked pace from its Yaris WRC on rough rally surfaces which should give it an edge when the championship enters its next round in Turkey this week.
Toyota won last year’s Rally Turkey but
Ott Tanak admitted the car was nowhere in terms of the pace its rivals had achieved in the mountains above Marmaris. Recent rough gravel testing in Greece has delivered a big step: and those are Toyota Gazoo Racing chief engineer Tom Fowler’s words.
Toyota and Tanak got lucky in Turkey 12 months ago. Fowler said the team couldn’t simply cross its fingers and hope for more of the same next week.
“From our pre-event test onwards last year, right through the recce and everything the drivers were telling us, we knew it was going to be tough last year,” Fowler told MN. “Then we had Ott sitting ninth on day one, which is pretty much last of the factory World Rally Cars.
“For days two and three, we knew if we could keep the car on the road and avoid problems, we could probably make the podium.
“We decided not to start making changes or go on a set-up mission in the middle of the rally. We accepted that we weren’t fast, but we understood the others could run into trouble.
“That won’t happen this time. The other teams have learned about this rally and they’ll be ready for it. We can’t and won’t rely on bad luck or poor reliability from the others.”
Fowler’s engineering team has been working on a process of lightening suspension components to reduce mass on each corner. While Greece wasn’t quite a Eureka moment, the difference with the new parts was marked.
“It’s a big step,” said Fowler. “And it was a bit of a tricky decision to put so many new parts into the cars for one rally.”
Asked if the team had taken a gamble,
Fowler replied: “This isn’t something we’ve rushed into, we’ve thought about this for a very long time. These parts have been in the homologation papers since January. Basically, when we first made this car in 2017, we simply didn’t have the time to go into every detail on every damper and suspension part – that’s a lot of parts. Now we’ve had the time to do that and after the test and seeing the results of the test, it was a no-brainer.”
Fowler added that these new developments explained the presence of a fourth Yaris WRC at Rally Italy.
He added: “These parts are the very reason that Juho [Hanninen] was in Sardinia. We thought about running them on the cars in Italy, but in the end decided to run Juho and see how they went under rally conditions. They worked very well, that’s why we’re going with them in Turkey.”
In short, the new parts in the Bos-sourced suspension will offer improved traction without compromising ground clearance.
“We’ve lightened some of the connector components in the suspension and the shimming inside the damper is a little different,” Fowler said. “Naturally, as engineers we were a bit more [guarded], but when all three drivers went for this, the fastest set-up, at the test, it was hard to argue.
“How big a step is it? It’s hard to say. We were a fairly long way behind last year, so it’s possible we’ve just caught up with the rest. We’ll see this week.”