| World Rally News | New Team | Suzuki SX4 WRC |
Suzuki's plans to enter the WRC with a capable challenger to take the fight to Subaru, Ford, Citroen and Mitsubishi has taken another step forward with its car completing fully-fledged tarmac tests recently.
The test course itself proved a big challenge for the Japanese entry, encapsulating what one might expect from a rally stage: hairpins, big elevation changes, along with various corners requiring different entry speed.
With the Tour de Corse looming ever-closer, the Suzuki SX4 WRC is proving a quick and reliable rally car, already boasting a specification close to what is planned to be used in this season's WRC test entry.
Nobuhiro Tajima, President of Suzuki Sport commented: "The machine is shaping up to an extent that I think it's competitive, to quite a degree. But our rivals' machines are also evolving to be faster and stronger, so we need to make sure we find even more speed and performance from our car.
We've decided to move up our schedule and try and see if we could incorporate into our test-entry 2007 model the specs originally intended for the 2008-entry model."
This approach would give the works team an even better chance in 2008, providing extremely valuable data that could give the team extra knowledge of how each new component reacts to the different stresses of rallying in varying conditions.
Tajima added fighting talk to the expectations of the Suzuki effort: "Corsica is just a few months away, and we'll be working to steadily improve and bring our machine to top shape so we can hope to show some fast rally driving."
The WRC hits Corsica on October 5th.
Kyle Molyneux - 27 Jul 2007