Atko bolsters Aussie WRC hopes

Next year’s Hyundai World Rally Championship contender is in the ballpark to be competitive from its first event, according to Australian rally ace Chris Atkinson. Now the Gold Coast driver just needs to lock down one of the two factory drives to take advantage of it.

Atkinson, whose testing performances in the three-door i20 WRC car in Spain last week drew praise from Hyundai Motorsport’s team manager, confirmed the car felt competitive against most of the sport’s dominant brands.

“Compared to a current WRC car it feels good, actually,” the former Subaru WRC driver confirmed.

“Until you get on a stage you don’t know exactly where you are. We are in the window, though. We are not miles away.”

Atkinson might have lost his full-time ride in the WRC with the demise of the Subaru team after the 2008 season, but he has had one-off drives in 10 WRC events since, setting top-three stage times in both a private Ford Fiesta and a Citroen DS3 in the last two years.

It’s this experience of the competition that was among the reasons Atkinson was hired as one of Hyundai’s three official test drivers in the six-month run up to the Korean car company’s return to the WRC with the i20 at the Monte Carlo Rally next year.

“That’s one of the reasons I got the job, isn’t it? I am experienced, so that’s one of the things on the plus side for me,” he said after two recent two-day tests.

“Even though I haven’t been full-time in the WRC, I have been doing a lot of different things in a lot of different cars and I know what’s required and how things should feel.

“You might normally have the car 98 per cent there, but you might have another six months of fine-tuning it to get 101 per cent for every surface and every grip level. We are doing it all in a shorter time frame.”

And Hyundai isn’t sparing any effort or expense in delivering a competitive package for its much-heralded return to the championship it left so ignominiously in 2003. For Atkinson’s Spanish test, attended by motoring.com.au, the team had one large transporter, two giant Mercedes-Benz vans, a catering rig and 19 other Hyundai vehicles.

The fully funded factory operation is based out of a new workshop near Frankfurt in Germany, with 72 employees (and rising) and is, according to Hyundai Motorsports Team Principal Michel Nandan, an open-ended commitment to attract younger customers to Hyundai road cars.

Nandan also insisted that commitment would eventually extend to a hot road-car division, plus a customer rally car operation modelled on Malcolm Wilson’s M Sport operation (which built and ran 55 per cent of the entry list for this weekend’s Rally de Espana).

Nevertheless, while Hyundai’s commitment to the WRC is open-ended, its commitment to next year’s i20 WRC car will last just one season before it is replaced by a new world rally car based on the i20’s road-going replacement.

It has high hopes of scoring podiums in its first year back in the WRC, but it has given itself until the end of this month to nominate its lead driver for the 2014 WRC and may even split the driving duties in the second car between two or even three other drivers.

“We will have two cars, maybe three sometimes. The market is very open for drivers this year,” Hyundai Motorsports Team Manager Alain Penasse said.

“Most driver contracts are open this year and we are talking to everybody. Everybody is a possibility who has a bit of speed and a bit of experience.

“Everybody who has shown something we will take into consideration.”

And that’s where Atkinson comes in. Known to the team as a gravel driver, Atkinson actually scored more stage wins on tarmac than gravel in his last full-time season at Subaru.

“Chris was chosen for his experience and he has a very good overview of the WRC and has driven a lot of different cars, so we can have good feedback about that,” said Nandan during the Spanish test.

“So far, he gives us very good feedback. It helps us a lot.”

Hyundai Motorsports management was tight-lipped on the chances of Atkinson returning to the WRC with them, though, insisting it would not be pinned down on drivers before it had to be.

“We are investigating things about the drivers,” said Nandan. “I am not deciding alone but, yes, I have a lot of input.

“I think we can run two drivers and they can test or we can have more test drivers. There are many opportunities because we will also have a very big test team next year for the 2015 car.

“Next year for us is a big learning year. We have to teach the team to learn the car and that’s why we need a driver with experience.”

For his part, Atkinson said that while he would naturally love to be part of one of just two works teams in the WRC, he was concentrating on his testing commitments with the team and hoping that would bear fruit.

“It’s really hard to know what they think about me,” Atkinson admitted after four error-free test days in the i20 WRC. “Everyone is just doing their job and working very, very hard to do it.

“As much as I want to think about being in the team next season, it would be a bit selfish to be thinking about my future with them next year while I’m testing all the work they’ve been doing already.

“For me, it’s just getting on with the job and, as Aussies do, working harder than anybody else can work and I hope the results of that is what the right people notice.”

Atkinson has already helped to deliver more speed out of the i20 WRC in testing, with vastly improved stage times in the different road conditions in Andalucía and Cataluña.

“For sure, there were improvements over the tests, but you never see the full gains from a test in the rally stages.

“Where time is gained in rallies is in the knowledge of the surfaces and the different conditions and what makes the car work at its best in all of those conditions. It’s banking the knowledge.

“The biggest thing we have spoken about is that we are short of time to fill that bank.”

The 1200kg World Rally Car Atkinson is hoping to drive next year is based around the three-door version of the Indian-built i20 and it should deliver around 320hp (240kW) and about 450Nm of torque.

The i20 WRC car will use a suspension engineered by Reiger, Brembo brakes and Magneti Marelli electronics in a package 4000mm long and 1820mm wide.

“Next year is really a preparation for more than just this car. We should nominate one driver for the entire season – that’s an FIA rule,” Nandan said.

“The second driver we could play a little bit and it’s in our interest to not just have one second driver. It’s more beneficial for us and not to do a car specifically for one driver. That’s often not very good for the team and that’s one reason the test team will also be quite big next year.”

Next year’s test team will be hard pressed to work harder than Atkinson’s crew in Spain, where it ran countless software changes to the ECU, two centre differential changes, numerous damper tweaks and dozens of cooling and life-cycle tests in just one day.

“We kept running until about 7:00pm on the first day and we would have run about 150km on the second day. To give you an idea, there is about 100-150km of competitive running a day in a modern WRC event,” Atkinson said.

“The second day was quite good, actually. Really good. We stayed on the same road as the first day. It was just about putting miles on the car and the road held up pretty well. It got a bit rough eventually in places so we did some suspension testing as well.

“That was good data mining, too. We tried different dampers, different valving, different diff options and different things to look at the directions to go.

“They are running until the breaking point with a lot of components just to see what they have and how far they can push things.

“We had already made a good step on the first day. I was really impressed with the improvement the team had made.”

The team had a two-day break before returning to the gravel roads in Spain’s north-east, around Lloret de Mar, which hosted the WRC around a decade ago.

“It was very different gravel from the Seville stages; different road surface and different nature.

“No big hills but a lot of trees and banks along the road and the kind of road that really only gave you one line to work with.

“It’s good to try the car on different surfaces and conditions like that. That challenges everything a little more, so it’s good to do some work on that.”