The Subaru
World Rally team believe they can win rallies in the second half of the
FIA World Rally Championship season, despite a pretty dismal set of results in the first eight rounds of 2006.
Thus far this season, the Prodrive-run squad have failed to live up to their pre-season expectations and despite flashes of potential, particularly on gravel, the surface that dominates in the WRC, they have yet to win an event - their best results, two second places.
"Clearly, we are not satisfied with the Impreza WRC2006," said Subaru WRT managing director, Richard Taylor. "Its performance has fallen short of our expectations and our drivers haven't been able to achieve the results they deserve. We believe that some of the problems have been caused by a previous development process where the latest car and tyre packages were not developed consistently together. In addition, some elements of the design direction we have followed have not worked as well on rallies as our testing suggested they would. We're now correcting these elements. We have a clear plan for the future and we firmly believe our rally car will very soon be fully competitive.
"We expect that Germany will be a tough rally for us, but we will target podium finishes on all remaining events. We still believe we can win the rallies in Japan, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand."
Pirelli have often been blamed for the team's failure to perform, however Taylor believes that such an assessment is not correct and that switching allegiances would not necessarily help them.
"We are dealing with a combined car and tyre package issue, not just a tyre issue," he continued. "In Greece we saw real improvements in our performance because we had been working more closely with Pirelli. We now need to continue that process through the various ranges of tyres we use on different events."
As for how the team's fortunes will be turned around, Taylor added that all is in hand, following the shake-up in the management structure, which saw David Lapworth stand down from his position at the helm of the squad back in February.
"The new management team that was put in place three months ago has been looking closely at technical and operational aspects to identify the reasons why our performance has slipped," he noted. "We now have a clear technical plan which has evolved over the last few weeks and will help us turn things around.
"There are four development phases, Greece saw the first phase, there will be another in time for Germany, another in time for the homologation process on October 1st and a final phase for the 2007 homologation on 1 January. What we're doing is pulling as much as possible of our medium term development plan forward into the second half of this year. As part of the first phase before Greece we tested some new ideas to get the car and tyres working better together. The results were encouraging - as Petter's stage wins proved - but there were limits to what could be achieved in the time available. The nine week summer break will give us the opportunity to work on more fundamental improvements."
