Shortly after dropping the bombshell that Hyundai Motorsport is looking at running a Rally2 car for its frontline World Rally Championship challenge in 2027, the firm’s president Cyril Abiteboul said he wanted to know how the FIA would equalize performance between the all-new WRC27 specification and the more conventional Rally2.
FIA chief technical and safety officer Xavier Mestelan was happy to take up that debate – but not happy to talk about balance of performance. There is, he emphasized, no place for BOP in rallying.
Abiteboul’s question was: “Does WRC become a one-make race [with only Toyota potentially producing a WRC27-spec car] or is there some form of equivalency formula? If so, what is it? If there is such a formula, how do we work on making the most of that formula with our current Rally2 car?”
Mestelan answered the question, saying: “We are doing it well in WEC (World Endurance Championship), so it’s easy to do it. In WEC we use power and weight, here we would use weight.
“Our target is to put, in 2027, as many as possible cars in top category. To do that, in what we call short term, it’s to have in the same category Rally2 and the new WRC27 regulation. For that, we don’t want to balance the car, we don’t want to put in place what we call equivalence of technology – we feel this can damage the championship.
“We just have two technical regulations: one is Rally2, the other one is WRC 27 [and] both will have their advantage and disadvantage.
“That’s it. It will not be exactly the same weight. Same power, because [they have the] same engine, but we’re getting aerodynamic, wishbone, technology, forged damper, and so on. You could have some small difference, but at the end, it’s two regulations. Again, we don’t want to speak of balancing the platform. We just want to say that [there’s] two platforms, two different technologies.”
So, balance of power and equalization of technology are definitely not to be mentioned… but there’s still the matter of the need for a fair fight between a production-based car and the spaceframe chassis. Yes, they’ll have the same power output, suspension and transmission – but WRC27 is very likely to weigh more.
“If we need to make some adjustment, it could be only for the minimum weight,” Mestelan added. “The easiest lever, the best way for us to manage that, it’s weight. We strongly believe that we need to avoid to discuss about that [BOP] in rally. At the end it is the same target: we want that both [cars] will be at the same level of performance.”
So Cyril, in short, it’s about ballast.
