*was
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Well Sordo hadn't made any driving mistakes this year until Deutschland and has had numerous technical issues but still quite high in the points ranking. He's not a winner, but...a constant deliverer if something.
Tanak to Toyota was the worst kept secret.
But now it's confirmed it surely cant be long now til we find out the the big one - Ogier's situation.
mh?
It doesn’t make sense to blame Neuville; till Catalunya, he gave Hyundai 141 manu pts (almost 3 times more than Paddon). In a leveled field like the current WRC, it’s hard for a manu to win the series with only one top driver and that was Hyundai main problem, besides some mechanical weakness that become evident in spain.
Btw, how can you be so sure the i20 was developed around Neuville? He actually was the last one testing it, only after extending his contract in October 2016.
It's been said that Neuville never felt comfortable in the older Hyundai WRC cars, but the 2017 model was like made for him, meanwhile the new car does not suit Paddon's driving style and at the start of the season Paddon tried to adapt his style to the car but it did not work out.
If you have a capable driver involved in a car development since day 1, you may say the car was designed around him. It was the case with Loeb’s C4/DS3, Ogier and the Polo and even Tanak with the current Fiesta, but Neuville only took his first contact with the ’17 i20 two months after the testing/development started with Abbring, Sordo and Paddon at the wheel. It’s true that Neuville, like Sordo, has managed to easily adapt to the active diff, while Paddon struggled a bit with it, but that doesn’t necessarily means the i20 was designed with driver A, B or C in mind.