How to assemble the giant Meccano kit to build a rally car

It’s quite easy to marvel at the sight of a World Rally Championship car darting through narrow asphalt lanes, sliding between snow banks and surviving some of the world’s toughest rocky terrains. But exactly how are these machines built?

Hyundai Motorsport has lifted the lid on the process with a behind-the-scenes look at how it constructs its €200,000 i20 N Rally2 car that competes in WRC2, and has won back-to-back European Rally Championship titles in the hands of Hayden Paddon.

Regardless of discipline, race and rally cars are built meticulously – it’s a fine art to assemble a life-size Meccano or Lego set, featuring approximately 3000 parts. It’s a process that Hyundai has honed to enable it to produce 30-50 cars per year from its Alzenau workshop in Germany.

“To build a Rally2 car we need around 200 hours and basically two or three mechanics work on each car, so it means we can produce a car in two weeks,” explains Hyundai customer racing manager Benoit Nogier. “In Rally1 there are many parts that have to be adjusted to its tubular chassis and they have a lot more specific parts – they don’t use any standard parts. We don’t have too many standard parts on the car, but still for them everything is designed and with the hybrid that takes a lot of time. When the hybrid is involved they cannot have as many people working on the car, so it takes a minimum of 100 hours more than a Rally2 car to build.”

Perhaps unlike any other motorsport discipline, rally cars are specifically designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly so components can be changed during timed services. This means the four-wheel-drive i20 N Rally2, based on the road-going i20 N, has to be modified. The rally car shares approximately 25% of its components with the road car, albeit some are adapted.

“The standard car is not made and designed to be assembled and de-assembled as we do with the rally cars,” points out Nogier. “For example, the light on the front of the car is designed to be re-assembled once or twice in its lifetime. For us, we need to do this process sometimes two or three times a day. We have to modify the parts for what we need it to do. If we kept the standard electrical connectors it would not work.

“It’s a big part of the design and with experience we know which parts we can use. It’s a lot of work to adapt everything, but we know what we have to do.”