Hyundai's painful 2026 World Rally Championship season took another lurch downward on Day 2 of Rally Islas Canarias, with Grégoire Munster admitting on stage that he could not get the i20 N to do anything he asked of it and Adrien Fourmaux appearing to mentally check out of the rally entirely.
The Belgian was 9.1 seconds off Sébastien Ogier's pace after the opening test of the morning loop, and his body language at the stage end told the story before the microphone reached him. "Honestly, I didn't sleep very well before that day, so nervous about how I'm going to drive the car around the stages — and it's confirmed this morning," Munster said. "I'm honestly trying to adapt to driving. Nothing works. Nothing works."
Fourmaux's situation was, if anything, more bizarre. Asked at the stage end whether there was anything he could do to close the gap or whether the deficit was the limit of his weekend, the Frenchman gave a reply that suggested his focus had drifted somewhere else entirely. "Actually, yeah, I really like my shoes — playing with the pirate," he answered, in a moment that became one of the most-shared exchanges from the morning loop.
The rally's solitary Hyundai bright spot was Dani Sordo, the Spaniard returning to the WRC and setting the marque's pace through the morning loop, sixth overall after stage four. He took the realistic view of where the i20 N currently sits. "Of course, we need to improve the car a little bit, but we are working on this. The team is working really hard," Sordo said. "Maybe we are not yet fighting, but I'm happy because everybody is pushing a lot to make the car work, and this is the first step."
The baseline he was trying to match was being set by Sébastien Ogier, who returned from a brief mid-season hiatus and immediately reasserted himself as the master of Gran Canaria's increasingly hot Tarmac. The nine-time world champion took every available stage win during the first pass — only the cancellation of stage three preventing a clean sweep — despite reporting issues of his own. "It's going to be a stage win here," Vincent Landais radioed from the co-driver's seat as Ogier crossed one stage line. "Not happy with the car, to be honest. Or maybe the tyre. That's the main issue," Ogier replied. "A lot of understeer."
The heat exposed the limits of the Pirelli rubber across the field, with tyre temperatures pushed beyond their prime operating window through the afternoon loop. Sordo and the LMR-run Citroën of John Armstrong both flirted with the Armco barriers on stage seven, and Armstrong was forced down an escape road during a lock-up moment. "He's a lucky boy," came the radio call. "Bit of a disaster at the moment," Armstrong agreed.
At the close of Friday's running, Ogier sat at the head of the leaderboard by 8.9 seconds — Oliver Solberg, who had set the early afternoon pace, holding second with a 7-second buffer to Sami Pajari in third. Elfyn Evans was just half a tenth behind Pajari in fourth, with championship leader Takamoto Katsuta completing a Toyota top-five lockout. The Friday-closing super special at Estadio Insular allowed Pajari to set joint-fastest time with Katsuta, briefly reclaiming third on the road.
For Hyundai, however, the gap to that Toyota train looks structural rather than circumstantial. With two more days of unforgiving Tarmac to come and a car that the team's drivers are openly struggling to set up, the Canary Islands round risks becoming another marker of just how far behind Toyota's engineering programme the Korean marque has fallen heading into 2027 regulations talks.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/hyundai-wrc-canary-islands-2026-munster-sordo-fourmaux-day-2). Visit for full coverage.*