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Paddon eyes tarmac progress in Corsica

New Zealand's Hayden Paddon is focused on making further improvements to his tarmac driving technique at this week's Che Guevara Energy Drink Tour de Corse.

The 29 September to 2 October rally is the second of three consecutive Tarmac events at the tail end of the WRC season and features a surface that Paddon is working hard to master.

The Hyundai team's rising star drove 120 laps of a race circuit in a GT car in preparation for last month's ADAC Rallye Deutschland. But in the event, a spin, puncture and a huge off-road moment meant he finished in fifth place. After more preparation work since then, Paddon has set himself fresh targets for Corsica.

"Obviously we want to be more competitive than Germany and I think this rally suits us better, but the goals are not result driven," he explained. "It's about improvement and progress to be competing at the front in the future."

"With the long gap between Germany and Corsica, it's been a good chance to refresh a little, especially because the next five weeks are going to be crazy busy with four rallies and four tests. This downtime allowed us to investigate a bit what happened in Germany and work on some things to improve from that rally. We have also had some good test sessions with the team," he added.

This will be the second time that Paddon has contested the Tour de Corse. He and co-driver John Kennard finished fifth on the rain-interrupted 2015 edition.

This week, Paddon will drive a 2016-spec i20 WRC under the Hyundai Mobis World Rally Team banner. Thierry Neuville and Dani Sordo will drive identical cars for the main Hyundai Shell World Rally Team.

Zdroj: wrc.com