It began with a monologue about the state of rallying. Sat in a workshop surrounded by classic Fiat Ciquetenos mid-restoration, digestifs were accompanied by a polemic to polish off lunch. Many elements were discussed: the still-to-be-defined technical regulations that will replace Rally1 and in time Rally2, how participants can achieve return on investment, and marketing our sport in the digital age.
My rally-driving friend Mattia, on the receiving end of the flow of consciousness he’d instigated with his questioning, brought the discussion to a close: “I’m depressed now,” he said after a long pause once my diatribe had concluded.
Collectively as rally stakeholders, we can sometimes be prone to discussing the negatives. They demand our attention as problems to be solved before we can enjoy what we’re all really in this to do – layering the excitement of competition on top of the base thrill of speed.
I needed an anti-depressant to snap me out of darkening everyone’s mood. The solution, in retrospect, was obvious: of course one of the world’s most influential rallying families was working on the antidote. Cesare Fiorio, the most successful team director in World Rally Championship history, already has an astounding legacy of his own. But through the subsequent generations of his family, namely one-time WRC Group N champion Alex and his daughter Mariapaola, work is afoot on developing an entirely new type of legacy.
The Fiorio Cup is a truly unique event held annually in south-east Italy
The Fiorio compound, Masseria Camarada, is set in rural Puglia. Alex built a rally stage in the adjacent fields a few years back with his business partner Alessandro Bruschetta – also a rally driver – and today it hosts the Fiorio Cup.
Looking at the format, it’s easy to dismiss it as a glorified exhibition event: six drivers share two cars and the stages are a loop of 2.5 laps – run twice in one direction and twice again in the other. The final stage being at night brings some intriguing variety to the itinerary. It is in practice a rally sprint rather than a ‘proper’ rally.
But the event’s relevance received the ultimate validation last week. World champion Kalle Rovanperä, having finished his WRC commitments for the current season, was one of the six drivers present. In a season where he has done pretty much anything he’s felt like – testing an F1 car, drifting, mucking around with jet-skis on the lake – his decision to rock up to Masseria Camarada to drive a GR Yaris Rally2, slower than his usual Toyota, speaks volumes. The question for the rest of us to consider is – why?
The first part of that answer is obvious – fun. But such a one-word answer is a gross oversimplification of how the Fiorio Cup concept is executed. It’s not a pure exhibition event. There is something on the line.
Rovanperä was wandering onto someone else’s turf last week. Andrea Crugnola, the four-time Italian champion, had won every prior edition of the competition – and was in no mood to let the global superstar turn up and end his winning streak.
Andrea Crugnola was determined not to lose his Fiorio Cup title - even if his rival was the world champion
This was his chance to prove – both to himself and everyone else – that he was on a par with the a driver widely accepted as the benchmark of the current generation. And he was taking it seriously.
“Outside it’s fun,” said Crugnola, his hand gesturing to show the service park. “But once the visor goes down, it’s business.”
At the ceremonial start the evening before, held in the nearby town of Ceglie Messapica, Crugnola couldn’t help but peer off-stage towards Rovanperä, who was waiting in the wings for his turn to be interviewed.
That burning desire to best the world champion was abundantly clear after stage two. Crugnola had started before Rovanperä so was following the leaderboard like a hawk, waiting for the Toyota driver’s time to appear. When it did, Crugnola’s face dropped. Two seconds lost felt like a hammer blow: he’d stalled while braking for a tight corner and gone off.
One stage later he was suddenly in the fight again – he’d taken almost two seconds out of Rovanperä. Fiorio Cup’s dominant force was suddenly in the hunt for the win in the GR Yaris Rally2 they both shared (along with Harri Toivonen). But after his stage-winning run, Crugnola immediately dashed over to Rovanperä and effectively apologized for being fastest. The conditions hadn’t been equal – the road had been watered to lower the amount of dust being kicked up and Rovanperä had been most impacted by the lessened grip.
Dust and road position were a factor on Sunday
He wanted to win. But not like this. And in the end he wouldn’t get the chance to try and overturn Rovanperä’s slim 0.88-second lead – Crugnola had taken a 10s penalty for hitting a pole. Rovanperä could then cruise to the finish. Except he didn’t – Kalle went a second per kilometer faster in the dark.
Rovanperä’s mother Tiina was in in the co-drivers’ seat – not to call the notes, merely to enjoy the ride. And she noticed a difference as the darkness fell: “I felt the speed on the last run!” she remarked.
But don’t get the wrong idea. He was committed. Even the Fiorios were blown away by what he was doing on the track they’d built.
“Did you see Kalle at the first chicane? He was almost completely flat, only a little brake to put the weight forward,” points out Mariapaola.
The difference for Rovanperä was not out on the stages – he was the same Kalle he always is there. Even Toivonen at the back of the field was pulling his hair out, unhappy with his pace. It’s away from the stage that Fiorio Cup proposes a revolution.
On world championship events, every minute is spoken for – whether for drivers or even us media folk. It’s effectively impossible to take five minutes to wind down and rest your brain.
I had only spoken to Kalle in a press conference setting in the past. He fits the Finnish stereotype in being efficient with his answers if the question is a simple one. But, I suspect, during the Fiorio Cup we both went through the same journey: slowly switching off our WRC mentality and relaxing into this new normal.
“I ate my lunch in 20 minutes because I’m so used to it from the WRC,” says Kalle. We’re both in the same boat – there’s still almost an hour of lunch break remaining before the action resumes when we cross paths halfway through the rally.
Rovanperä felt the need to take a rest from the intensity of 13 world championship events per season this year, doing half the calendar instead. He could have been on a beach relaxing – but he was at another rally instead. So what can the world championship learn from the Fiorio Cup?
“I don’t think it’s super easy to take everything of course, but specific components perhaps,” Kalle responds. “Timing and scheduling is really easy to do. Every rally where we go, I haven’t really seen a rally where you actually need to start at 5am and come to service at 10pm to make the day.”
There’s a certain irony to the Fiorio Cup in that during Cesare Fiorio’s heyday, rallies were known for featuring vast itineraries, with 50-plus stages and criss-crossing entire nations. Yet, decades later, the eponymous event does the exact opposite – which Rovanperä considers its key advantage.
“We drive 100 kilometers per day in road sections [on other events]. Rally organizers needs to make it more compact: not so early starts, not so late finishes. Then people can interact with the drivers when they are not super busy or tired and angry all the time. Everybody can have a bit of time midday and end of the day to enjoy something else than sitting in the car all the time.
Rovanperä had some interesting thoughts on what the WRC can learn from the Fiorio Cup
“I understand it’s not everywhere that you can find three stages in a small area, but you need to take it in that direction. There are many rallies where we do one day of rallying on small area but then one region is giving sponsor money to the rally, so we drive a 150-kilometer road section each way for one stage – so the day would have be over at 5pm but now it’s 10 pm.”
By comparison, at the Fiorio Cup no-one turns a wheel before 9am and by 6pm, the dust has already settled.
“Some things need to be around so they can make the rally work, I understand,” Rovanperä continues. “But there needs to be some rules from the FIA or somebody, because now every organizer can do their rally like they want. It needs to fit inside certain time frame per day, this many kilometers, whatever. And that’s how you should do it.
“When you do the days like this, then we can implement more time for other things. But now we have no time to even do our job properly. If we do it like that, we don’t sleep.”
Extra idle time for the drivers doesn’t mean downtime for the fans. In between runs by the six competing drivers, a Lancia 037 and Stratos head out onto the stages for some demo runs, as does another Fabia Rally2 car being used for passenger rides and a fleet of buggies. But the drivers, feeling more relaxed than normal, are able to talk shop with the Delta Rally engineers running the cars, debrief with their team-mates, take photographs with the fans and still have idle time for chit-chat afterwards.
Everything away from the stages is radically different at the Fiorio Cup. There’s no disappearing off to team tents for three meals a day – instead, a building where all the competitors dine together, evoking memories of recces in decades past where the world’s best drivers did the same thing.
Fiorio Cup embraces rallying's rich history while offering a blueprint for the future
At a time where rallying desperately needs to identify a unique selling point that provides a different but equally compelling value proposition to the ultra-popular Formula 1, being its opposite in terms of atmosphere feels a necessity. It feels relaxed but contrary to stereotypes – especially in the south where time is considered to move slower than in the more white-collar north – everything ran on time. What gaps were in the schedule were there on purpose.
It was that same purpose-designed gap that I’d run into Kalle that I also found Cesare Fiorio standing alone in an empty service park (everyone else was still enjoying the long, relaxed lunch). I had to take my chance – a few minutes alone with the man who built Lancia’s legacy was another scarcely believable upside of the rally’s design.
When I point out the Fiorio Cup is an innovative concept given its unique combination of factors – the identical cars, the locked setups, the tidy and relaxed itinerary leading to a more convivial atmosphere – Cesare cracks a grin. He’s always been a change maker in rallying, no example more famous than the mid-stage tire changes on the Monte-Carlo Rally in 1983 to defeat the Audis.
I’d been at the launch of Lancia’s new Rally4 car a couple of weeks earlier in Balocco. I couldn’t resist asking about what he made of its comeback in such an understated manner relative to its heyday under his stewardship. But he wouldn’t be drawn on the negatives.
“Maybe Stellantis doesn’t have the budget,” he said, “but perhaps another manufacturer will.
Cesare Fiorio sees light at the end of the tunnel for rallying
“We are four generations including my father who was a driver. In my 40 years of motorsport I’ve experienced it all. Rally can still have a good future.”
Who am I to argue with Cesare Fiorio?
If we can marry his belief with practical implementation, perhaps taking some of the lessons from an event that made rallying enjoyable again for a world champion on a semi-sabbatical, maybe Cesare is right.
In a way, the lesson of the Fiorio Cup is that we’ve spent so much time optimizing the practical elements that we forgot to optimize emotion. It’s in our hands to end the negative cycle – but we’ve got to go back and remember what the point of a rally is. Just because an event isn’t a six-day epic that’s thousands of kilometers long, doesn’t mean it can’t still retain rallying’s soul.
Next time I see Mattia, I’ll try to remember Cesare, Alex, Mariapaola, Harri, Kalle and the rest at last week’s Fiorio Cup. That should help avoid depressing him – and myself – again.
