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WRC Rallye Deutschland: We need to work on the finer details, says Ostberg

M-Sport's Mads Ostberg says the team needs to work on the "finer details" in the aftermath of a disappointing Rallye Deutschland.

Ostberg had a tough start to the event in his Fiesta RS WRC car, and was then overhauled by Hyundai's Hayden Paddon on Saturday afternoon, eventually finishing almost a minute back in P6.

"It's clear that we have some work to do before Corsica. There are some areas that can be improved on the car set-up, but also some areas of our driving too," Ostberg conceded.

"There were big gaps ahead and behind us so [on the final day] we've just been playing around with the set-up to try and improve our confidence in the car.

"The general set-up is working quite well, but it's the finer details that we need to work on - mainly the differentials - to bring everything together.

"We have tried a lot of things over the course of the weekend. Not all of them worked out, but I can promise you that we will all be working extremely hard over the next month to ensure we show an improvement in Corsica."

Meanwhile, team-mate Eric Camilli also had a disappointing event, retiring in the first stage when he went off near the end. The Frenchman re-joined under Rally 2 on Saturday and eventually came home in 50th position.

"It's not been an easy weekend but we have come away with a lot of experience. We didn't make a great start to this event, but that is life, and we had to pick ourselves up and work hard to rebuild the confidence. I think we did that, and we managed to improve our times quite a lot from one pass to the next," Camilli said.

"A big thanks to the team for all of the work they have done this weekend. It wasn't the result we wanted, but they put in 100 percent as always.

"Now, we're fully focused on Corsica where we will be determined to have a clean run and show another improvement."

M-Sport boss Malcolm Wilson added: "Rallye Deutschland has rarely been particularly kind to us. We've never won here, and it wasn't the best of weekends for us this year either.

"After his mistake on the opening stage, Eric has been playing catch up all weekend. It was a very difficult rally for him, but he did well to rebuild his confidence and regained some speed along the way.

"Mads had a clean run which delivered a solid sixth place on his least preferred surface. There's some work to do before he can feel completely comfortable on Tarmac, but we'll work on some solutions to try and help him over the next month." 

Zdroj: crash.net