WORLD RALLY TEAMS BEGIN PREPARATIONS FOR 2020 SEASON
Squads descend on the Alps for mileage ahead of Monte Carlo’s WRC opener
Monte Carlo Rally testing began in France last week, with Hyundai and Toyota running in the Alps, while M-sport Ford will begin its round one preparations early next month.
Champion Ott Tanak remained tight-lipped on the details of his test – and the revised parts he requested from his new Hyundai team – but did, however, confirm at the FIA prize-giving event in Paris that he felt comfortable with the car during his day of testing in the French Alps.
Tanak worked with team-mates Thierry Neuville and nine-time world champion Sebastien
Loeb, both of whom were also in action in the Alzenau-based team’s test car last week.
Hyundai’s main rival for next season, Toyota, was also hard at work, with the Yaris WRC running for seven days. Kalle Rovanpera was first to test the car, followed by Elfyn Evans and Sebastien Ogier – all three of the frontline drivers ran for two days with Takamoto Katsuta driving on Tuesday, the final day.
Both teams ran in similar conditions with early-morning frost giving way to dry roads. Neither team ran high enough to chase snow and ice, preferring to give the drivers a base of consistency to learn their new cars.
Toyota’s technical director
Tom Fowler, talking to MN ahead of the final two days, said the test had been positive.
“It’s been good,” he said. “Everybody seems happy. I wasn’t on the test, but I’ve been in constant contact with the engineers.
“Monte Carlo is such a difficult event to test for. Until a driver has been with a team for a long time, it’s difficult to go through all the possible permutations of what might happen. With Elfyn, he knows it’s important for him to understand early in the season what the changes do to the car. He went to the test with one of our Monte-specific set-ups, which starts out as a dry Monte set-up evolving into different areas depending on the conditions.
“We showed Elfyn what that was and then let him move in different directions with spring rates and spring balances. That means he’ll know the options if he starts to get a bit of understeer, he’ll know what he can do with the bars and the springs. Generally the changes do the same things from car to car, it’s physics at the end of the day, but the steps the teams take to make those changes can vary.”
The teams will return to
France early in the new year.