Hayden Paddon and co-driver John Kennard have secured their fifth top-five finish in a World Rally Championship event this year with a push to lift their performance even higher on the final day of the Tour de Corse.
Starting the final day of the French WRC event dubbed ''rally of 10,000 corners'' on the island of Corsica in seventh position overall, Paddon leapfrogged two positions up the leaderboard on the rally's penultimate stage.
The New Zealand combination's time for the 41.46 km twisting and turning tarmac test equalled that of rally winner Jari-Matti Latvala and was just 3.7sec off Hyundai Motorsport team-mate Dani Sordo, who won the stage.
''I'm really happy with how the weekend's progressed,'' Paddon said.
''Having been 15th after the first stage, we would never have thought that we'd get into the top five come the end of the rally.''
''It's been very tough,'' Paddon said.
''Obviously some very trying conditions early on, and then it's been slowly improving for the rest of the rally. We've been able to show some good progress from where we were in Germany. From this we can take a lot of positive signs.''
Before the event, Paddon spent a day at a circuit racing school and two days training with ex-WRC driver Nicolas Bernardi in an effort to improve his performance on tarmac events, given his relative lack of experience on this surface.
''We're much closer to our team-mates.
"OK, to be the leading Hyundai here is a nice surprise, but the most important thing is the progress we're showing on tarmac.
"We've been able to put the driving techniques I learnt before this event into practice and we can see the benefits of that.
''Obviously it still needs a lot of fine tuning and a lot of work before it becomes more natural in the car, but we're heading in the right direction.
''It's given us something now to work on for Spain, which is our next rally on tarmac, in three weeks. With a day on gravel in Spain, as well, I think we can be a lot more competitive and try to be in the top five, at least, again. My confidence is good at the moment and we've got a lot of good things to look forward to.''
Paddon's top five result has moved him into eighth place on the WRC drivers' championship points table.
