WRC2 title contenders Oliver Solberg and Yohan Rossel have both expressed their distaste for the championship’s current rules allowing drivers to choose the events they score points on.
Competitors in the World Rally Championship’s Rally2 championship can enter all 13 rallies in the year, but are only allowed to nominate seven of those to score points on. A driver’s best six results from those seven creates their final championship tally.
Unlike categories like Junior WRC where competitors have a fixed five-event schedule and all fight each other on each rally, WRC2 can be won without title contenders doing regular battle.
Famously, Kajetan Kajetanowicz put together a championship campaign in 2022 by doing the flyaway events where the competition was less dense – eventually facing off against rival Emil Lindholm in Japan but losing out after he crashed on the exit of Isegami’s Tunnel.
Kajetanowicz has used the WRC2 rules to his advantage in the past
This season, Nikolay Gryazin has implored a similar tactic by only nominating three events so far – waiting to see how everyone fares in the championship. He will therefore score points on all the remaining four events of the season (Acropolis, Chile, Central Europe and Japan).
Solberg, Rossel and Sami Pajari are however the best placed in the championship as things stand, but have only all competed against each other once (in Portugal).
“I don’t like that,” points leader Solberg told DirtFish.
“I think everyone should just do the same rallies. I guess you have to be fast everywhere.
“The way I look at it, I don’t care about choosing this and this and that, because my goal is WRC. And then I have to be fast everywhere. It’s very simple. So I just try to do my best every different rally when I do in WRC, too. That’s it.”
Solberg wants to fight the best drivers on every event
The current regulations have prompted some drivers to be coy about where they are competing, but not Solberg.
Asked when his next round was, he replied: “Chile. I’m not afraid of saying which rallies I’m doing, because if you want to be the best, you have to beat everyone anyway, so I don’t care.”
Andreas Mikkelsen has previously asked the FIA to look into finding a way for all WRC2 contenders to do the same rallies when he was fighting for the title, but the stance back in 2022 was there would be no change.
“The thing that you’ve also got to bear in mind is we’ve had a very good WRC2 battle on every round of the championship,” FIA road sport director Andrew Wheatley argued at the time.
“If we limited it to seven rallies or eight rallies which, commercially, is a lot for a private team to support, you would have a good battle on seven or eight rallies but nothing on the others.”
However Rossel joined Solberg in pondering whether a change should be explored.
“I don’t know how many times I competed against Oliver, but maybe just two times during all the championship,” Rossel told DirtFish.
“It’s never easy to know where you are. I think it’s the same for everybody. But for me, it’s not natural.
“When you see the Olympics, if you have 100 meters or swimming, and if you don’t play for the same race… maybe we can adapt that for sure.
“But for me, the plan is just to show the speed on every surface.”
Rossel is aiming to show his speed on all surfaces
Rossel isn’t set to fight Solberg again for WRC2 points this season, with Acropolis selected as his penultimate points-scoring event and Central Europe expected to be his last.
Pajari meanwhile will be in Acropolis but the identity of his final event is unclear.
“I think, clearly, Greece is the next one,” he told DirtFish. “And then we will see the rest.”
Pajari could be expected to travel to Chile though, as victory for Solberg in South America would guarantee the Swede the title.
Entries for Rally Chile close on Tuesday August 27, with the entry list published one week later (September 3).
