[WRC] Tour de Corse 2019

[Fast Eddie WRC]

Eddie, have you even sat in a WRC car passenger seat and felt the sheer forces one of these things puts out in every direction?
There’s literally no comparison to a road car.
And didn’t Evans say it was a stone anyway?

T16 stating the obvious again. Of course theres a big difference between a rally car to a road car.

But both having a low-profile tyre hitting a pothole in a straight line is comparable. That's why I was interested in the explanation.

[T16]

[QUOTE=Fast Eddie WRC;1213802]T16 stating the obvious again - cheers, i thought you said I was full of shit... good to see you have seen the light.

But both having a low-profile tyre hitting a pothole in a straight line is comparable - Like I said, the forces inside a WRC car (especially braking) are beyond most people's comprehension, unless they have experienced it from within a car, no matter what car you drive on the road.

[br21]

https://wrc.net.pl/app/uploads/2019/...ight-final.pdf

report of weight check during Corsica, interesting reading...

[dimviii]

Citroen boss Pierre Budar said: "The road for the test was not as wide and smooth as we had during the first section of the rally.

"We miss a bit of this kind of road in the test and this is part of the explanation."

"We couldn't fix the problem once we were in the rally because we have defined the set-up and we have some dampers according to this set-up.

"When you go to scrutineering before the event, they seal the dampers and we have five sets - including different [specification] dampers for Seb and Esapekka.

"If we had been running three cars, then we would have had seven sets of dampers and maybe this could have [given us more choice]."

Lappi's concern was the lack of speed from the Citroen when it arrived at roads similar to those tested on.

"The biggest difficulty has been missing the grip on the front," he said.

"We have understeer all the time.

"We changed a lot of things, but we can't get rid of the understeer with the options we have available on the event.

"We went backwards [from last year] and I don't know how.

"Friday was a problem with the road but on Saturday it was similar to the test [road] and still we couldn't find the speed."

https://www.autosport.com/wrc/news/1...isca-struggles

[Mk2 RS2000]

For Neuville this is the way he has been driving on tarmac for last 1,5 years at least. There were good vids from Spain showing the same thing.
1. Throws car into corner, often with handbrake
2. Slides trough

How can that style get top 3 times is partly a mystery to me, maybe he just gains the time in other types of corners? (shorter or tighter) Might explain why sometimes he is in the top and then on next stage he can be way down again.

Sordo drives like a FWD car and does ok times most of the time (4-6th). Mikkelsen (last year) and Loeb (now) tried to drive like normal wrc car (same style as Tanak, Evans and Ogier here, trying to drive "on rails") and end up with horrible stagetimes.

Therein lie the basic problem with the Hyundai. The design that make the best use of Neuville's style works well on tight roads but does not work on fast open corners which is why it suffers on faster stages. Hyundai tried to change Paddon's style of driving to suit the car but all it did was reduce confidence. When they finally agreed to his requests for a different front differential it became easier for he and the other drivers to drive as was shown by their results during the last half of last season but these changes did not go far enough as in my opinion there still a suspension issue to be rectified

[denkimi]

Therein lie the basic problem with the Hyundai. The design that make the best use of Neuville's style works well on tight roads but does not work on fast open corners which is why it suffers on faster stages. Hyundai tried to change Paddon's style of driving to suit the car but all it did was reduce confidence. When they finally agreed to his requests for a different front differential it became easier for he and the other drivers to drive as was shown by their results during the last half of last season but these changes did not go far enough as in my opinion there still a suspension issue to be rectified

i don't remember him driving like that in the past. i always thought he had the same style like ogier and loeb, since he learned it the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbL-OWc6ZVk

[mknight]

i don't remember him driving like that in the past. i always thought he had the same style like ogier and loeb, since he learned it the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbL-OWc6ZVk

Well that's what Mikkelsen said when they drove together in Monza 2017, that Neuville used to drive with same style on tarmac like him before (ref. your Fiesta vid), but nowadays drives with that "throw the car in and slide around".

The way it looks like now though is that they keep fine-tuning the setup but the basic principle of the car makes only this style somewhat work (but still Neuville isn't the fastest, this year he was basically 4th fastest (Evans, Tanak, Meeke) and that's even without Citroen in the mix).

The question is if the car can ever be fastest without big changes and if the big changes are not coming does that mean all other drivers have to try to adapt to this style?
Mikkelsen claims he is now trying, but we haven't seen him on tarmac this year (Monte doesn't really count with snow tires and dirty tarmac). I doubt it will work much for him though.
After seeing Loeb on tarmac will they try to make him change his style or be satisfied with signing a (probably expensive) 9 times champion which just won a tarmac rally and have him fight for 5-7th place on his best surface?

Under Nandan last year it looked they choose to ignore the problem cause Neuville and Sordo were somewhat competitive (4th-6th place in speed but often ending on podium due to others crashing/getting punctures), wonder if this approach will continue or not. As I wrote multiple times last year "ignoring" the tarmac issues as well as the issues in Finland makes it much harder for them to win any title.

[EstWRC]

Riviera best of rally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht4L6QFJKmQ
Best of Evans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY-jKhXzjwY
Best of Neuville https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMcKOcijsJA

[dimviii]

lol

[T16]

lol

Which bit you laughing at Dimviii?