Stick or twist? That is the question when it comes to dealing with punctures
Photography by Hyundai
Words by Luke Barry
No stone is left unturned in the pursuit of performance in the World Rally Championship.
That means even the decision-making process the competing crew has to make when an actual stone is overturned is constantly under review.
It is at Hyundai Motorsport, at least.
The i20 N Rally1 squad has found some form having brought Toyota’s run of seven World Rally Championship wins (six this season) in a row to an end in Greece.
But complacency breeds failure, so instead the focus in Alzenau is on improvement – not celebrating an overdue Ott Tänak victory.
The car has been subject to improvement with homologation jokers spent on transmission and the chassis lately. But strategy is a massive gateway to results too.
Hyundai boss Cyril Abiteboul (r) is not resting on laurels of success for Tänak (l) on Acropolis
And the past two WRC events have given Hyundai Motorsport president and team principal Cyril Abiteboul food for thought regarding one of rallying’s inevitable factors: punctures.
“We are in the process, to give you a little bit of an inside story, of reviewing a bit of cut-off – the cut-off being basically the kilometer, the distance at which you decide to continue, to carry on, or to change your tire,” Abiteboul told DirtFish.
It’s an interesting admission made all the more fascinating with a dose of deeper analysis.
Typically it will take a WRC crew around 1m30s to change a tire in a stage, but various factors can obviously affect that. Each WRC team will therefore calculate data for each stage, working out at which point (in kilometers) it’s more time efficient to continue on the damaged tire than stop and change.
Thierry Neuville exemplified this in action on the fourth stage of Acropolis Rally Greece, where he elected to continue on with a puncture (19km into the 26km test) and dropped just 39.5s instead of over a minute.
“I think it was a good decision,” the world champion quite rightly reflected afterwards.
Fourmaux suffered double jeopardy of time lost by continuing with puncture and stopping to replace it
However, his team-mate, Adrien Fourmaux, demonstrated this calculation working the opposite way at the previous round in Sardinia.
Around 5km into a 24km test, Fourmaux decided to press on and continue despite the tire pressure alarm lighting up his dash. That proved to be the incorrect call, as at 16km the Frenchman had to stop and change.
“We are playing a little bit with the ratio to find the sweet spot,” Abiteboul added.
“And I’m not sure that we are there. But for sure, they are very much tire and manufacturer dependent. So that’s the sort of thing we need to learn with the extra amount of data that we have on Hankook.”
It’s just another way in which WRC teams and drivers are having to adapt to a change in tire supplier from Pirelli to Hankook in 2025 – a variable that has defined the fortunes for plenty over the first half of the year.
Words:Luke Barry
Tags: Cyril Abiteboul, Hankook, Hyundai, punctures, Tires, WRC, WRC 2025
Publish Date July 13, 2025 DirtFish
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