The South Korean marque has made significant strides to catch WRC pacesetter Toyota this season but, after nine rounds, Hyundai has achieved only one victory in Sardinia compared to Toyota’s seven.
Arguably Hyundai’s biggest improvement has arrived in fast gravel rallies. In Estonia, it finished second, third and fifth, while last weekend Neuville scored a second consecutive runner-up result, as Teemu Suninen claimed fourth.
Hyundai has calculated that it was losing 0.17 seconds per kilometre to Toyota in Estonia with a similar gap in Finland, where the team has benefited from its testing facility.
Team principal Cyril Abiteboul is confident the developments it is working on can close that gap, with the next wave of upgrades earmarked for the October homologation window.
It is unclear exactly what is planned to come online with the team also conscious that it needs to address reliability issues following a series of propshaft failures at Safari Rally Kenya in June.
“I think it is a fair representation of our package as things stand,” Abiteboul told Autosport. “We simply need to be satisfied with the step we have done against ourselves last year. We need more of the steps for the future.
“The figures don’t lie, they are facts. This [0.17s per kilometre] is the pace we need to find in the car through a mix of probably a bit of optimisation of what we have, but also our developments - which are taking a bit of time.
Source: Autosport