Hyundai has announced its return to the FIA World Rally Championship with the unveiling of an i20-based rally car at this year’s Paris Motor Show.
Marketing Director at Hyundai Motor Europe, Mark Hall , said that “The WRC is a spectacle filled with excitement and dynamism – the perfect embodiment of the Hyundai brand. Our participation will demonstrate Hyundai’s engineering excellence and desirability, and will also help to enhance our passenger vehicles in future.”
The subject of Hall’s statement is a rally-going i20’ featuring a turbocharged 1,6-litre petrol engine that develops 224 kW and is coupled with a fully sequential gearbox sending drive to all four corners.
Although the rally car is roughly recognisable as an i20, the aggressive body work with prominent aero add-ons and flared wheel arches lend it a purposefulness that’s a far cry from the otherwise workaday B-segment runabout.
As previously reported, Hyundai’s last foray into the F2 class of the World Rally Championships with Alister McRae, Kenneth Eriksson and, later on, Juha Kankkunen at the helm of the Elantra WRC car between 2000-2002. The team logged some respectable results, including Kankkunen’s fourth-placed finish in New Zealand in 2002.
This latest development could well be construed as Hyundai’s latest instance of throwing down the gauntlet to Volkswagen, as the i20 rally car is likely to go head-to-head with the German company’s Polo R rally car.
