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M-Sport boosted by suspension upgrade for WRC Rally Italia Sardinia
M-Sport-Ford will debut a revised suspension package at Rally Italia Sardinia that aims to give its World Rally Championship drivers more confidence to push on this weekend’s gravel stages.
The Ford squad is running a new specification damper across its four Puma Rally1 cars for Josh McErlean, Gregoire Munster, Martins Sesks and Jourdan Serderidis, as the team looks to extract more from its package.
Dampers are an area that teams can develop throughout the season without needing to deploy one of its limited homologation jokers that are usually deployed to re-design more significant components on the cars in the quest for more performance and reliability.
The new specification damper was used during the team’s pre-event test generating positive feedback from the drivers ahead of this weekend's 16 rough gravel stages, that will play host to the sixth round of the WRC.
“We have been doing damper work across the board so everybody is running some slightly revised dampers,” said M-Sport team principal Richard Millener. “This is one of the things that we are free to modify and do things whenever during the season. That should help them.
“We are always constantly evolving and doing small things and every team is doing the same really, there isn’t really this massive ability to homologate anything new that people seem to think there is because most of the rules are frozen, and other bits require the use of homologation jokers and we only have a few left.
“We always get good feedback on a test. They [the drivers] all seemed happy with the direction but every day we tested them on a different road so we were getting different kinds of feedback and at the same time is is still different to a rally.
“I wouldn’t say it is 100% going to be working everywhere but they do feel that it is a benefit from what we had until now.”
It is hoped the new damper package will help the team extract more from the new-for-2025 Hankook tyre.
“Obviously we are trying to find a set up that works to try and give them [the drivers] more feeling and work the tyre better,” Millener added.
“Certainly us and Hyundai are still trying to understand how the tyre works and Toyota are maybe a little bit further ahead than us. We need to see what really happens in the rally as long as it gives them a bit of confidence [that is good].”
Rally Italia Sardinia begins with the first of 16 stages on Friday morning.
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