Can Hyundai hold on?

Hyundai finds itself holding a somewhat unexpectedly strong hand in this year’s World Rally Championship battle – but Toyota is now fielding its own pair of aces for Chile to try and close that gap, with Sébastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanperä both entered into the championship’s South American leg.

Toyota also had a full house of factory drivers for its home round in Finland. All looked rosy for bringing a huge haul of points home to sweep into the lead of the constructors’ championship. Then Sahloinen-Moksi came along and claimed the GR Yaris Rally1s of Elfyn Evans and Kalle Rovanperä in one fell swoop.

That fateful Sunday morning delivered a brutal 39-point swing in Hyundai’s direction, ending Toyota’s momentum of eating into Hyundai’s manufacturers’ championship lead on the fast gravel rounds.

Now Toyota, according to Hyundai’s program manager Christian Loriaux, is resorting to “desperate” reactions by drafting in Ogier for what is understood to be all of the remaining rounds this season. And since then, it’s added Rovanperä to its Chile lineup. But here’s a question: will Toyota’s plan actually work as intended? Can the tide turn so deep into the season by drafting in the big guns to save the day?

It can work. And it has done in the past. But there are caveats.

Toyota has turned the tide once before

Since Toyota and Hyundai began competing directly against each other in 2017, they’ve taken the teams’ title off one another twice this deep into the season – once per manufacturer.

The good news for Toyota is it has climbed out of a far bigger hole than this one in the not-too-distant past. It was truly in the trenches come the midpoint of the 2018 season, languishing third in the title race and 51 points off Hyundai’s pace.

Anything that could go wrong did go wrong: Jari-Matti Latvala went on a run of five consecutive retirements (though recovered a small number of consolation points under super rally on three of those) while Tänak struck a rock in the middle of the road in Portugal and retired, then had a broken radiator and retired again in Sardinia. And Sardinia had been Esapekka Lappi’s first visit to the podium all year.

Neuville’s strong first half of the season, with wins in Sweden, Portugal and Italy, had propelled Hyundai to the top of the table, aided by podiums from Dani Sordo and Andreas Mikkelsen. Between that trio and Hayden Paddon, who shared Sordo’s car, Hyundai’s quartet had racked up an average of 30.29 points per event. Toyota could muster only 23.

The turnaround from Toyota thereafter was dramatic. So too was Hyundai’s collapse.

Tänak won three on the trot to rescue both his own season and Toyota’s. Latvala was on the podium three times in the next four rounds, and Lappi twice. Catalan asphalt proved a bridge too far but Latvala’s Australia win was merely the cherry on top – the hard work had already been done.

Over at Hyundai, Paddon picked up podiums in Turkey and Australia but it was too little, too late. Hyundai’s downfall was its regular-season drivers running into trouble: Neuville retired from the lead in Turkey with broken suspension, went off the road on Rally GB’s Sweet Lamb, lost a podium and powerstage points in Spain with a puncture and then everything unraveled in Australia, delaminating a tire, clipping a tree and finally taking a wheel off. Mikkelsen meanwhile cracked the top five only once in the back six rallies of the year.

That combination of Toyota’s resurgence and Hyundai’s deflation turned the entire season around. In six rounds, the Finnish squad had outscored the Alzenau army by 78 points. But what had been the bigger factor: Toyota’s resurgence or Hyundai dropping the ball?

It was a bit of both – but more down to Toyota’s resurgence. It upped its pre-Finland average from 23 points per round to 34.5 points. Meanwhile Hyundai backslid horrendously, going from 30.29 points per round to 21.5.

Fast forward to 2024 and it becomes clear why Ogier is in for the rest of the season and Rovanperä is also Chile-bound: they are the team’s best bet at supercharging that average points per round number in the manner Tänak and Latvala did in the latter part of 2018. That on its own is not enough – but Toyota need to be ready to pounce if Hyundai falters, as it did six years earlier.

The difference this time is Toyota isn’t relying on the full-timers to finish the job off. The cavalry has arrived. If it pulls off another 2018, it’ll have been by playing the same hand Hyundai lost with that season.

Hyundai knows how to finish the job

Anyone who believes, on the back of its 2018 downfall, that the Hyundai team are bottle merchants when it comes to title run-ins would be very mistaken. One year later, Toyota should really have clinched the teams’ championship given Tänak’s irresistible form – the Estonian secured the title with a round to spare before Australia was eventually canned and made Spain the unintended season finale.

But there were two problems for Toyota. One, Neuville had outperformed his 2018 efforts, even if he finished further behind Tänak in the drivers’ title race than he had Ogier a year earlier. An extra 26 points on the board at least helped offset some of Tänak’s domination.

Toyota had found itself in the trenches yet again but this time because Latvala and Kris Meeke rarely cracked the top five. Finland was the first time all year Toyota achieved a double podium finish, with Latvala backing up Tänak. The team would need to pick up its pace – and it did, improving its average score from 26.44 to 31, aided by a 1-2 in Germany.

The difference this time around was not only down to Neuville’s stronger run-in at season end but the second car putting up big numbers consistently – the very thing Toyota had failed to achieve. Thanks to the combined efforts of Mikkelsen, Sordo, and Loeb, one of Neuville’s support actors was in the top four on nine of the 13 events and in Italy, Sordo and Mikkelsen led the line and banked all the teams’ points.

Before Germany, Hyundai’s average score per rally had been 29.11. In the last four rounds, it was 29.5. Consistency, the very thing which had eluded it 12 months earlier, delivered success.

Going full circle, Hyundai then got revenge by doing to Toyota what it had been on the receiving end of in 2018. Covid-19 disruption cut the 2020 calendar down to seven rounds – but there was a distinct difference between the opening three rounds and the four events which ran after the initial lockdown disruption.

Ogier and Evans had been the most consistent drivers over the front three events – and would end up battling for the drivers’ title. Behind them, Neuville and Tänak between them secured top-two finishes in each of the final quartet of events – but it was the third car that meant the two drivers who’d dominated the drivers’ title couldn’t by extension wrap up the constructors’ crown.

Second place in Estonia for the late Craig Breen, third in Turkey for Loeb and then victory in Sardinia and third in Monza for Sordo transformed Hyundai’s fortunes. Toyota had averaged 36.67 points per round before Covid hit – after the enforced break, Hyundai hit 38 points per event.

That season proved beyond any doubt that Andrea Adamo’s decision to bring in driver rotation was the right one. Without it, there would have been no second title for Alzenau.

Can Toyota’s world champion cavalry save the day?

The grand irony is four years later, Toyota is now relying on that same tactic to take the teams’ title away from Hyundai’s hands. And stranger still, Toyota has brought home the fewest points when it has fielded both Ogier and Rovanperä together, averaging only 37.67 with both versus 44 with only Ogier and 43.33 with only Rovanperä. That’s down to Rovanperä’s crashes in Portugal and Finland – the first his fault, the second unavoidable.

So far, it hasn’t worked. Toyota trails by 20 points – this is the reality of its situation. But what Finland did show before Sahloinen-Moksi turned the season on its head was Toyota can very much recover its position at the head of the field this year. There hasn’t been a 20-point gap between teams on any rally this season – but then Toyota had been scooping up overall points while Hyundai dominated Super Sundays.

If Ogier and Rovanperä can be as ruthless on Sundays as they have been Fridays and Saturdays, and the full-timers can run interference, Toyota can very much use Hyundai’s old tricks against it to change the course of this championship.