Adrien Fourmaux believes his struggles for pace at the Central European Rally can be attributed to a mystery issue that his M-Sport World Rally Championship team will investigate.
Fourmaux has been one the WRC’s form drivers this year but has strangely been off the pace on this weekend’s asphalt roads, which yielded a WRC2 victory for the Frenchman last year.
He completed Friday’s six stages 1m33.4s adrift of leader Thierry Neuville in what proved to be an extremely difficult day for the 29-year-old.
A hybrid unit failure on stage four (Strasín 1 - 26.69km) caused by an impact from a jump landing put Fourmaux on the back foot. Under new regulations that came in last month, the unit can no longer be reset, meaning he had to complete the remaining four stages without hybrid boost.
However, Fourmaux felt that the hybrid loss was only part of his problems having highlighted handling issues before the failure. At the midday remote service, he said that he was struggling with “everything” when asked what areas of the car were causing strife.
Changes made at the remote service improved the Puma across the afternoon.
But Fourmaux believes there has been something awry with the car since there start of the event as it is not performing the same as it did on the pre-event test or when he was competing at the Rallylegend event last weekend.
“Feeling-wise it seems to be better but the time is still really bad, so I have no idea,” Fourmaux told Autosport.
“I really struggled on the dirty stuff to slow the car down and rotate it. It is definitely not ideal, but we had a test in the wet – it was really clean with no cuts, and then we went Rallylegend where it was fully dry.
“But here there is a lot of dirt on the road, so I think we missed something on the test.
“But also there is something wrong because directly from the start of the event I mentioned to the team that the car doesn’t feel the same as it was in Rallylegend with the same springs, same anti-roll bar and same dampers, the car was already much softer. There is something we need to investigate.
“We are going to change the anti-roll bar and springs and we will see if there is any difference.”
Fourmaux was one of four Rally1 drivers to suffer a hybrid unit failure on Friday, which added to the frustration.
Team-mate Gregoire Munster and Toyota's Sami Pajari also had to run four stages without the boost as teams are unable to reset the devices on safety grounds under the new regulations.
M-Sport has confirmed that it has replaced the hybrid units on its cars ahead of Saturday's stages.
“We had an issue in Greece and we have had the issue here, it is really frustrating, so I think it is big shame for everybody,” Fourmaux added.
