Volkswagen Motorsport boss Jost Capito has told fans of the FIA World Rally Championship expecting instant success from the German make to be patient.
With the debut of Volkswagen’s all-new Polo R WRC on January’s Rallye Monte-Carlo drawing ever closer, Capito says it will take the early rounds for the squad to establish itself, while a push for a podium finish is unlikely until the second half of the season.
“It will be Portugal before we get the real picture of how competitive the car is,” Capito told WRC Live. “Okay, we’ve done the Dakar Rally very successfully but that’s one event. Now we have 13 events when we have to do the engineering, designing and racing in parallel. We are starting from scratch, nothing has been outsourced from Volkswagen so we have to lean everything and our mistakes cannot be hidden. By the second half of the season we want to get podiums but not by luck.”
Volkswagen has signed an all-star cast to front its driver line-up in 2013 with Jari-Matti Latvala recently being recruited to partner Sebastien Ogier, while Capito has suggested that a third could be entered for Andreas Mikkelsen from Vodafone Rally de Portugal in mid-April onwards.