Rally Portugal has run out of Matosinhos for the final time, with the event shifting south to Viseu in time for next season.
The Exponor Centre, home to Rally Portugal for the last 11 years, is being knocked down and will be unavailable as a service park and rally host location from 2027. Viseu has paid around half a million euros to host the nation’s WRC counter and was announced as the new home earlier this year. The agreement lasts three years.
Rally Portugal organizers are expected to comment on the move in the near future.
What does this mean for the stages?
Plenty of stages from recent editons are expected to remain next year
The city of Viseu, home to just over 100,000 people, sits inland and around a 90-minute drive south of Matosinhos and an hour north of Arganil. Thursday afternoon’s Águeda-Sever and Sever-Albergaria stages are the closest.
There are plenty of roads available around Viseu and no shortage of stages – especially looking further south of Figuera da Foz. The biggest loss could be one of the biggest names, with the Fafe powerstage now 100 miles away from the service park.
A brand-new location
The question of where the first ever Rally Portugal started from is kind of complicated to answer because the 1967 event offered a concentration run similar to the Monte Carlo Rally. That means cars and crews were inbound from Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Paris, Brussels, London, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva and Amsterdam.
And inbound to… the Spanish city of San Sebastian. From just south of the Andorra border, 72 cars set about a three-day, 1,500-mile route which comprised 166 controls to ensure the 30mph average speed was maintained. The finish was definitely more Portuguese: Estoril.
Estoril remained the home of Rally Portugal until 1994. Throughout those years, the organizers ran a mixed-surface route drawing on the more southerly stages through the Sintra mountains before the crews turned north for the dirt roads up around Porto.
Reflecting the FIA’s desire to see WRC rounds more centrally located, Rally Portugal moved its base north to Figuera da Foz for three years from 1995. This spelled the end of the use of the Sintra stages. Matosinhos and the Exponor Centre took over from 1998 until Portugal lost its place in the world championship after 2001.
Returning six years later with a service park based out of Faro Stadium, a new chapter in the event’s history was opened. The shift south was made in an attempt to contain spectator numbers which were always higher up around the sport’s Porto heartland.
Within three years, however, the return north was already being talked about; the Fafe Rallysprint (a warm-up promotional event) ran for the first time in 2011, as did a superspecial in Lisbon. In 2015, the Portuguese organizers gave in to public demand and the Matosinhos Exponor opened its doors to the WRC for the first time since 2001.
Last weekend, it closed them to the championship permanently.
