Originally Posted by
mknight
The timeline is extremely logical as Citroen is right now working on changing their rear aero.
If you want to run conspiracy theories you can turn it around saying that Toyota deliberately send the car to the homologation with multiple "on the edge" issues late so that FIA had little time to check properly and not keep them from starting in Monte 2017. At that time VW just left and they certainly couldn't discourage Toyota much.
As mentioned Toyota had to rework multiple things on the car during the first rallies to comply with the homologation including things like materials inside the engine.