Speaking on the latest Krunching Gears podcast, Galway International Rally’s winning co-driver Andy Hayes revealed how recent tests have helped improve Josh Moffett’s performance in their Hyundai i20 R5.
Moffett and Hayes led the opening round of the Irish Tarmac Rally Championship for 14 of its 15 stages. The Hyundai crew claimed the Galway Rally win by 14.1 seconds over Volkswagen driver Meirion Evans.
“I was quietly confident [heading into Galway],” said Hayes. “We had a fairly bad run on Cork 20 and Donegal Harvest by Josh’s standards.
“Neither of us were happy with our pace coming out of that.
“In the meantime, Tom Gahan did a lot of work to the car with Josh doing a lot of testing.
“We made a good few changes [to the car] that really worked.
“We then went to Wexford and pipped Meirion there, although it was tight enough.”
Hayes described how a couple of mistakes meant their speed on November’s Ulster Rally went under the radar. They finished fourth on the final round of last year’s British Rally Championship.
Recent experience of wet and slippery conditions on both Wexford and Ulster no doubt helped Moffett in Galway as well.
But Hayes believes Tom Gahan’s recent work developing their Hyundai’s set-up has been instrumental in finding a winning formula at the start of 2022.
“Tom Gahan is very good at that [finding small improvements in the car].
“Tom would have been onto us after Cork 20 to make some changes for Donegal Harvest and then make some changes for Wexford, again for Ulster, and again over Christmas.
“There is no big change, people were asking over the weekend what we were doing differently but there was nothing really other than trying to get a little bit closer and closer all the way.
“There were a few little things we knew about after Ulster. We made those changes over Christmas and everything seemed to come together for this weekend.”
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You can listen to Hayes’ full conversation with Kevin Glendinning via the link below. Podcast host Glendinning also spoke to International and Modified runners-up Meirion Evans and Jason Black.
Photos courtesy of Ross Delaney and Adam Hall