The former Renault F1 boss is undertaking only his second WRC event as team principal after leading the team at Monte Carlo in January, but the Frenchman has already identified areas for improvement.
One of Abiteboul’s key early objectives is to improve the way the team communicates, engages with its drivers and its decision-making process. Having spent the majority of his career working in F1 at Caterham and Renault, Abiteboul believes an F1-style approach in this area will benefit the WRC team.
While Abiteboul says the changes this weekend are not a “revolution”, his longer-term ambition for the team is to focus more on engineering, while assessing Hyundai’s overall motorsport future.
“As always working with two timelines in parallel, there is short term and that is immediately, so starting here this weekend we are going to make a few changes here and there in the way we run events,” Abiteboul told Motorsport.com.
“It is not a revolution because this team doesn’t not need revolution, and frankly I can say that there is no way I can bring a useful revolution due to my experience.
“There are small changes here and there and the way that do things and the way we engage and communicate and the structure of the decision-making process.
“That is where Formula 1 is impressive with its chain of command and the amount of information that we have to digest in a very little amount of time. I think here it is a little bit different but there are some things we can transfer from F1 to this world so that is what I’m going to do this weekend.
“It is going to be an interactive process and we will take it from there.
“It may mean the drivers have bit more engineering duties than media duties. In rallying there are long days and you get very little interaction with the drivers, and we see that we have been struggling with set-ups, and still ending the rally not totally convinced what we have done.
“In my opinion, we need to be stronger from an engineering perspective. That is going to be the centre of the show. I want to have a bit more of a systematic way of how we do things.
“Then there is the long term where we have to think about the future of Hyundai Motorsport and the customer racing and we have had a number of discussions about what we want to do, but it is too early to talk about these things.”
In addition to these changes, Hyundai will also have a new team manager leading the way in Sweden in former Toksport team chief Tolga Ozakinci.
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