Subaru's managing director, Richard Taylor has revealed that the Banbury-based outfit will step up their development programme in the second half of the season and introduce new updates at a much faster rate.
Subaru introduced its new car, the 2007 spec Impreza WRC back in March for the Rally Mexico and while there have been flashes of potential since then, number one driver
Petter Solberg is still struggling to keep up with
Citroen's
Sebastien Loeb and the two BP Ford's of Marcus Gronholm and
Mikko Hirvonen.
Speaking during a break in testing in Wales, where Solberg was due to hand over the car to
Chris Atkinson today [Friday], Taylor added that while they will have some tweaks for the Acropolis next weekend, it won't be anything major due to the fact there is only a two week gap between that event and the last one in Sardinia. He expects a lot of progress to be made though during the two-month summer break.
“We're in the middle of a test at the moment, and it's difficult to set precise targets for Greece until we've assessed the results of our three days in Wales," he explained.
"The close proximity of the Acropolis Rally to the previous event in Sardinia, allied to the fact that we have to use the same car for both events, means that we won't have much time to implement improvements to the car, so we're anticipating that the changes in Greece will be small.
“However we have a very good engineering plan for the summer break and also expect to utilise some extra engineering resources to help our development move forward at a faster rate. I'd expect to see significant progress by the time the WRC reconvenes for Rally Finland in August.”
To date this season, Subaru have scored 34 points, 3 points less than the
Stobart Ford team, which lies third in the manufacturers' and a long way off Citroen and current leaders
BP Ford, the latter have almost three times as many points.
