This problem has always existed in Peugeot Rally cars. Starting from 206 WRC.
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Everything was designed wrong on this car.it seems to be a joke and not a rallycar.
As someone has said before - the Rally car must be engineered as reliable in first place. Then can be made faster by tweaking this and that.
The photo above is best illustration of this season for Peugeot.
First you need to make fast car, then you should make it reliable.
It's relatively easy to make reliable but slow car, much more difficult to make fast one. When you've got good package - fast car - then you can focus on making it reliable. It's way easier than to make fast car from slow one.
Starting in cold it's often problem with rally cars, so you should prepare for it - by testing it and beeing prepared, at least with spare battery at exit of parc ferme time control.
Usually bigger problem is with starting atmospheric cars rather than turbo ones, as those first have more compression ratio - thus more difficult to turn the engine.
Anyway, this years performance of 208 R5 in ERC is farce... In Valais Abbring had problems with many things.
By "reliable" I mean to make it strong enough to survive the various conditions it'll face and still leave a room for performance imrovements. That is the way to build champion car imo, examples - VW Polo, Skoda Fabia S2000/R5. If You go totally wrong with something like the engine in reliability and homologation options are limited, sorry this is not the way.
Ten minutes to start of last day stages, wonder if anybody can be a traith to Lappi?
Lappi extending his lead after first stage of the day