The 2022 WRC season saw a dominant performance by Toyota’s Kalle Rovanperä, with the 22-year-old Finn becoming the youngest champion in the sport’s history, and the first of its new hybrid era. However, over the course of the year, though Toyota remained imperious, Hyundai, in particular, made considerable performance strides with its i20, turning what looked like a disaster at the beginning of the year into a rally-winning machine.
Due to the way development works under the WRC regulations, updates must be introduced via the use of ‘jokers’, meaning manufacturers tend to add parts for the next season before the year is out, in order to make best use of their allocation. Jokers can only be added at fixed points in the year, with submissions having to be made on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. Though, as will be covered later, there are ways to circumvent these restrictions.
‘Quite a lot of the reliability-type improvements we’ve made have been somewhat statistical. This is not a way of engineering we would prefer to do in other areas of the car’
Tom Fowler, technical director at Toyota
‘We had five jokers for 2022, which had to be used up by December [’22],’ explains Toyota technical director, Tom Fowler. ‘We used some of those during the year and then we put the last ones into place ready for Monte Carlo this year. We’ve then still got our 2023 jokers available, but used up everything that was possible in 2022 to make the ’23 car.’
Power and control
One of the main areas teams focused their development efforts on through 2022 was control of the hybrid system. Contributing
