Those expecting Hayden Paddon to re-emerge in Europe with scintillating stage times and a dominant performance in last weekend’s round of the European Rally Championship were in for a shock.
A sixth place finish and only two top three stage times were underwhelming from an outsider’s point of view, but Paddon was the first to admit before the rally that the result was furthest from his mind.
There were a few things going against the Kiwi as he contested his third rally in three weekends, not the least that he was driving a brand new car.
Having never driven his new Hyundai i20 Rally2 in anger before the pre-event shakedown, Paddon was always going to be pushing uphill to get on top of the new machine.
Of the car that he’ll drive at Rally New Zealand in late September, he said: “The base of the car is very good, but we have a lot of work to do to the set-up to get dialed in for my driving style.”
He and co-driver, John Kennard, certainly had their work cut out.
Paddon has spent the last three years fine-tuning his Hyundai i20 AP4 on home soil, having literally had the car built around him. It handles how he wants, stops how he wants and it fits him like a finger in a glove.
Not so the new Rally2 car, which took him longer than perhaps expected to master.
He jumped out of the blocks with third and second fastest times on the opening two stages of Rally Liepāja in Latvia, but after that, sixth quickest was the best he could manage.
“I’m struggling with any feeling with the set-up at present, so we have a lot of work to do to adapt to my style,” he reported after day one. “Considering the feeling in the car, some of the times have been quite okay, so we can take some confidence from that and can only improve from here.”
Another challenge for the all-Kiwi team was the super fast Latvian roads that are similar in nature to the upcoming WRC rounds in both Estonia and Finland.
In reality they’re nothing like those found in New Zealand, so setting a car up on roads that you haven’t seen or been on for some years is a monumental task.
“While P6 doesn’t look great on paper, without yesterday’s spin it might have been very different,” Paddon said after the rally.
“But that was never the target here – we learnt a lot about the car and have a direction going forward.”
Those expecting Paddon to be on the pace in the Rally2 category at Rally Estonia might also be in with a shock as the list of entries reads like a current ‘who’s who’ of the WRC2 class.
Andreas Mikkelsen, Teemu Suninen, Egon Kaur, Kajetan Kejetanowicz, Emil Lindholm and Jari Huttunen will all make Paddon’s life tough, but again, results over the next two European rallies are not his main focus.
The plan is to be competitive by the time the WRC arrives in New Zealand in under three months, and to build his speed back up to WRC standard before a full assault on the 2023 WRC2 championship.
So, while fans may not be seeing their beloved star on the podium or setting fastest stage times, they’ll take comfort in the fact that it’s all part of the bigger picture.
2023 is when things will really start to get serious.
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