Toyota Gazoo Racing is the first team to have been randomly selected by the FIA to carry out the in-season tire testings for the Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli which will start today (7 April).
The Toyota team have selected the current FIA World Rally Championship leader Kalle Rovanperä to do the testings in Croatia using the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 car to improve the tires for the new Rally1 hybrid cars.
Rovanperä is expected to do about 200 kilometres of testing with the new hard compound asphalt rubber.
The regulations allows Pirelli to run three development sessions with each manufacturer in the championship, it means one day per team, with the order being selected by the FIA.
The two other test sessions will be run with M-Sport Ford World Rally Team and Hyundai Motorsport, and the type of surface will be agreed according to Pirelli’s development needs.
“The objective of the test in Croatia is to check how to evolve the hard tyre in line with the development of the new hybrid cars, which are heavier and more powerful than the previous generation, and so potentially more demanding on tyres,” Pirelli rally activity manager Terenzio Testoni, said.
Yesterday (6 April) Rovanperä did also do a pre-event test ahead of the Croatia Rally which will take place on 21-24 April, the additional seat time for him will be valuable as last year when WRC first visited Croatia he went off the road on the opening stage and was forced to retire from the event.
“The biggest challenge this year for us is to try to manage the experience gap from the guys who did the rally last year because we did almost the full first stage and after that we don’t have any experience,” Rovanperä said.
“In an event like this where it seems that the conditions, the grip and the stages are quite difficult, if you have this one-year experience more it can be a bit tricky for us to try to manage that.”
