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Off topic, but I am a firm believer that Hyundai is a top team (maybe not this year, but still), that was massively let down by its drivers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fast Eddie WRC
Put Ogier / Tanak in the Team from 2017 onward and we would look at a dominating team with many constructor and individual championchips
Tanak was there twice, did you forget that? And koining Toyota team for testing and not Hyubndai, is quite clear it's the cars that let him down again and again. In that team there were so much great drivers and still they struggle year by year. We saw that if great drivers are put in M-Sport they can do miracles, which sadly can't be said for Hyundai. Based on results Hyundai did best when there was Adamo pulling the strings. I strongly believe that Neuville won the title simply because Ogier did too many mistakes. If he would drive like last year he would easily won that too. I blame Cyril to turn that team to worse, simply because he is not the right man for this sport. After so much years they could at least be somewhere, but they getting nowhere. If they continue like that in WEC where competition is way higher, intense I don't know how they will ever achieve great things. They've had so much chances through all those years in WRC when there was only 2-3 teams to compete.
Ogier +Tanak + a promising 3. driver which initials are not T.N.Quote:
Originally Posted by deephouse
Would have, could have, but I refuse to believe that they would have let the team develop this understeering thing that only ever (and only sometimes at that) suited Thierry
What? The hybrid i20 in 2022 and 2023 was one of the most unreliable rally cars ever made, not even prime Loeb could have won the title with a car whose suspensions would fall apart on road sections. Only in 2024 it was close to Toyota, and in fact Neuville won the title. The hybridless + Hankook i20 in 2025 and 2026 is close to undriveable and much slower than Toyota more often than not.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ferranis
Tanak drove for Hyundai for 5 seasons, couldn't clinch the title and was fed up with the car's being slower and more unreliable than Toyota. Ogier couldn't handle the C3 having 2 powersteering failures in a whole season as sole reliability problems, let alone the Hyundai.
Ferranis has a different point
He means if Ogier and Tänak would have been there prior 2017 and developed the cars not jumping into those wrongly developed ones.
You can have a case about driveability, but it's still up to engineers to develop the car according to the driver input. It's possible Ogier and Tanak would have been better at developing than Thierry, but would the engineers be able to transform their input into a good car? Neuville didn't ask for an understeering car, nobody would, in the past he had to modify his driving style and use handbrake a lot to counterbalance how the car naturally was.Quote:
Originally Posted by EstWRC
For reliability and parts that just fail, that's totally up to the team.
Hyundai have been in this series for 13 consecutive seasons, what would they get out of more, especially when it is moving to a constructor basis.
Agree, basically everytime they develop new car, they are too late to the party, the car is rubbish and they act like they just start rallying.
Really appreciate the nice discourse and can totally understand all the replies and where you come from.Quote:
Originally Posted by EstWRC
To emphasize: Hyundai lacked a star driver like Ogier (with Tanak as second) that made the team their team, preventing all the shenanigans and leading it to success. Thierry just isn't this kind of guy
I am thinking if Ogier made Ford a championship contender, what could he have done with the resources of Hyundai
What shenanigans would have Ogier prevented, exactly? Ogier doesn't design car parts, engineers do. Ogier can say "the car understeers too much", maybe he can loosely suggest modifications to differential, everything else is up to engineers. And this is if we give for granted that Ogier would have had the patience to pull Hyundai out of unreliability, which he didn't have with Citroen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ferranis
Thierry is the only driver in recent memory who won the title while driving clearly not the best car. Even Ogier's Fiesta in 2017 and 2018 wasn't the fastest, but was the most reliable.