These are early days for Hyundai Motorsport’s former Customer Racing Manager, Andrea Adamo, in his new role as Team Director.
The WRC Presentation was the first opportunity to learn how the restructuring of the team is progressing.
Until this year both the team management and technical development work was handled by Adamo’s predecessor, Michel Nandan, but things are changing. Adamo explains:
“My new title is Team Director. I decided to split the roles inside the company in order to be more focused in the work management.
"Coming shortly will be specific details about new responsibilities at the team base at Alzenau and future plans in general. Undecided at this time is the long-term future of the World Rally Car. R5 work continues on full steam.
"We developed it in 2018, homologating many things. The step up in performance is quite important, and has been shown with important wins in Italy, in Eastern Europe and in other good performances in WRC2 events 2018.
"We will have other homologation coming along in 2019 and I'm pretty happy about the step up that we did in the last year. The car will remain as it is in terms of homologation until the end of 2020 at least.”
Hyundai's Andrea Adamo.
As for the expanding customer operation, he added:
“Looking back from where we started the 1st December 2015, where we were basically four persons, I think my people did an amazing job. Now Customer Racing is up to 60 persons. They built many R5 cars.
"We stepped up the performance of the R5 cars. They did an amazing TCR car. With our customers we won four championships, we are selling many cars, we have lots of customers who believe in Hyundai Motorsport Customer Racing and I think this is one big achievement.”
How do you think the Hyundai R5 compares with the other R5 cars?
“Maybe I am too much optimistic, but I think it is as aggressive and as competitive as the others. Of course the market is a very fluid thing, but I think we have shown clearly that the car is as competitive as the others.
"In my opinion the R5 power train is a strong point, while the latest evolution suspensions are a good point. The bad point is the fact that we had to develop it in a short time and you never get a second opportunity to make the good first impression.
"At this time (I only started this work on January 2nd) I cannot comment on our World Rally Car. All I can say is that the one strong point that I know of at the moment is the amazing livery!"
WRC life will catch up on Adamo very fast, especially the moment when Sebastien Loeb arrives back from South America and Hyundai Motorsport presents a three car team at Monte Carlo (for Thierry Neuville, Andreas Mikkelsen and Loeb) for all to see.
