Toyota’s chances of winning the World Rally Championship manufacturers' crown are “pretty much gone” after Hyundai scored a 1-2-3 at the Acropolis Rally, reckons team boss Jari-Matti Latvala.
The reigning manufacturers’ champions endured a weekend to forget, leaving Greece 35 points behind Hyundai in the championship standings with only three rounds of the season remaining.
Toyota’s rally unravelled on Friday when all three of its drivers, Sebastien Ogier, Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta encountered problems.
Evans suffered a puncture and turbo failure on the opening stage which cost the Welshman almost 10 minutes, before retiring on Saturday following a slow speed roll. Katsuta crashed out on stage three while occupying second, having won the previous stage.
Eight-time world champion Ogier led the rally until stage five when he suffered a similar turbo failure to Evans, conceding more than two-and-a-half minutes.
Plans to recover the lost ground via Super Sunday points were thwarted when Ogier suffered a puncture and rolled while heading the Sunday classification. Ogier did however finish the event to claim 13 Saturday points, while Evans added 18 points to the pot with eight of those from Sunday’s action.
After witnessing the points deficit to Hyundai increase, Toyota's Latvala believes the team should put title thoughts aside and focus on winning the remaining events in Chile, central Europe and Japan.
“It's good that he [Sebastien Ogier] can get the [Saturday] points, but the reality is that we lose the Sunday points, we lose the Power Stage points for both championships, which are basically gone," Latvala told Autosport.
“Hyundai start to be in a position, that with current [points] system, they will defend it [the lead] now for the last three remaining events, so they won't take such risk to lose those [titles].
“For us, the [title] chances are pretty much gone and we need to change the target to try, from now on, to start winning events.
“We need to forget about both championships for a little bit. We have been in a situation where we have been trying to force it and we can't force it anymore.
"We can only do it by driving well by winning the events without pressure for the drivers. That is the only way and if something goes wrong with Hyundai, then it can be a massive bonus.
“But at the end of the day, we need to forget the targets and just try to relax the drivers. And if something great happens, then it would be a Cinderella story. But at the moment, we need to forget thinking about the championship points.”
Latvala described the opening day of the rally as ‘Black Friday’ and when reflecting on how the event unfolded: “It started to go wrong from the beginning, and it kept going in the wrong direction, but that's the way it is when it goes.
“In life you have good times and you have bad times, you can’t have everything perfect every year. We have had three amazing seasons, so for sure, at some point comes the bad moments, and now we are having it.”
He added: “There's nothing else we could do, for me Sebastien had to go out in the stage and he had to try to go flat out because we needed Sunday points and we needed Power Stage points. With those points, we would have been able to keep ourselves attached in the championship.
“Unfortunately, it didn't work out. We had to pay the penalty.”
