Quote Originally Posted by dimviii View Post
so you think that starting with 4 drivers at more rallies will be a disadvantage for Hyundai.
and all this,because once they tried they failed.
There is always the option that you actually start to read what I write, but it looks it might be too hard. Somehow it always feels like you read 1/4 of the post, turn off your brain and hit reply... let's try one last time:

Running 4th car with current rules just to take driver points off the top 3 is expensive and with high-risk of failure.
Both based on the one time Hyundai did it but also by analysing the normal results. Just yesterday I did a full analysis of how many points other drivers (Loeb, Sordo, Mikkelsen, Meeke, Latvala, Lappi, Suninen) took off the top 3 so far in the season (in Hyundai thread) . The average was about 0.7 points per rally. Sordo has 2 points/rally but that's only from 3 starts so it's quite uncertain. Note that 3 of the 7 drivers took zero points off the top 3 over 16 combined starts). So in the extreme you risk that in 16 rallies your 4th driver doesn't help in any way.

Even in the average case using all that money to take 1 point per rally doesn't seem to be good use of money. If It was Hyundai could have been doing that since end of 2017 and Toyota during whole 2018. Similar situation at Citroen where they decided not to run 3rd car this year.
All of them think that using the money for car development is a better idea.

Now Toyota is trying to somehow combine both. We won’t ever really know how sucessfull the development part was. Overall it might be a good idea for a few rallies during the year but likely not for the majority of the season.