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Toyota World Rally Championship driver Ott Tanak says he is still not fully comfortable with his Yaris despite taking convincing wins on the two most-recent rallies.
Back-to-back wins in Finland and Germany have brought the Estonian back into contention for the 2018 title, alongside Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville and M-Sport Ford driver Sebastien Ogier.
Tanak is now 36 points behind championship leader Neuville, with a 13-point deficit to five-time champion Ogier in second.
But despite his recent success – which includes 18 stage wins from 41 in Finland and Germany – Tanak believes he can find more pace from his car at the remaining four rounds of the season.
“I [still] don’t feel it’s my car at the moment,” the 30-year-old told Autosport.
“I feel [there are] quite a few things we could improve and we’ve been pushing quite hard to get new things.
“I don’t know when they will be available, but we see places we can improve.
“The engine is good, we saw more from that in Germany than in Finland – it’s more about the torque and acceleration [rather than top speed].
“When we get these things, we can be quicker and I can be even more [comfortable in the car].”
Tanak said the Yaris’ chassis was the main area in which Toyota could make progress.
“We would like to have the car working better in some specific conditions,” he added.
“When it’s nice, dry and clean it’s good, but when the conditions get more tricky we have some trouble and we’d like the car to be more progressive.
“Normally the car is good when the conditions are consistent, but if they are constantly changing then we struggle a little bit.”
Toyota team principal Tommi Makinen said the his squad was already deep into chassis development work. “We would like to understand some of these areas in more detail,” said Makinen.
“We have looked at the transmission, the centre differential and now we look at the suspension and the geometry to see if we can find something more.”