That hard crashing sound you hear in the distance is the brute force of reality smashing like a bulldozer through the 2027 World Rally Championship technical regulations concept.
Toyota team principal Jari-Matti Latvala and Hyundai WRC program manager Christian Loriaux have already sounded the alarm bells: the proposed solution at the stipulated cost cap isn’t going to happen. It can’t be done. But there is an appetite to get much closer to that target number than today’s standards.
The question is – how?
Loriaux’s been designing championship-winning rally cars for a long time. He’s lived through the heydays of massive manufacturer involvement and push rulesets to their limits. Our current reality is nothing like the state of play when he penned the Subaru Impreza WRC2000 or Ford Focus WRC03. Shooting for the moon when you need to stop spending space-program levels of money doesn’t really work. So what can be done?
The first potential headache is sticking to spaceframes. While lauded for their safety, low production numbers, with much work done by hand, mean they don’t benefit from economies of scale. But Loriaux believes it’s still the most feasible option regardless of the additional cost it involves.
“The problem is,” Loriaux tells DirtFish, “you take a manufacturer of a Yaris, a small compact car, and you take another manufacturer like Ford that’s got the Puma – you cannot be competitive with a Puma, so you’re forced to make a regulation where you say: okay, these are the dimensions for everyone and you make the body shell look like what you want to market. Then we force into that the problem of a tubular frame being more expensive.
Spaceframes still offer the most viable base despite added cost, says Loriaux
“So we end up where we are now, where the car has no technology at all. It’s the lowest technology we’ve had since 1990. But the car still costs one million euros. It’s ridiculous.
“Going to a regulation that allows everybody to participate, with the tubular frame at a certain dimension, keep the center of the tubular frame the same for everybody so that hopefully you can manufacture it in a larger number and reduce the cost – all that makes sense. After that, trying to make something that’s between a Rally1 and Rally2 that everybody can do, that makes it a lot cheaper.”
Loriaux also expects open competition to drive down costs for space frames. He expects uniformity in dimensions between the A and C pillar to mean chassis manufacturers will sweep in and compete to produce these externally at the lowest possible cost:
“It will be a common design,” Loriaux explains. “I suppose there will be a few chassis manufacturers that will make those. So there will be competition as well between those to try to supply that the cheapest. A tuner [entrant] can go to that. After that, the bit at the front that supports your engine and your suspension and the bit at the back is not very complicated to make.”
For Hyundai’s program manager, the worry is from the materials used for parts that tend to sustain damage from the regular rough-and-tumble of rallying. Carbon fibre is expensive. Every puncture and the damage it tends to cause to the bodywork of current Rally1 cars can run into six figures. Steel-lined wheel arches are part of the 2027 proposal, which should help alleviate some of those issues.
Loriaux has suggestions for where cost savings can be found
For Loriaux, the bigger worry isn’t necessarily purchase cost of the 2027 car. It’s running costs.
“A fair bit of the cost will be on all the body panel and the tooling of the body panel,” he explains. “But I think we could be more clever with underfloor protection and so on, not allowing composite on the aluminium floor and things like that.
“To be competitive, you try to run lower and lower and lower [to the ground]. Maybe having a minimum ride height, so you don’t trash the bottom of the car all the time, will help. For an engineer, it’s frustrating because it’s good to push and run as low as possible. But we can say, OK, this is a minimum ground clearance, it’s the same for everyone.
“It’s not just the cost of buying the car, it’s the running cost as well, and what we cannot reuse.”
The other big sticking point is engines. Rally1 engines cost approximately $200,000 each, hence the 2027 regulations stipulating a shift to production-based Rally2 units.
So begins a fine balancing act: a Rally2 engine in its current specification lacks the required grunt to make the new cars significantly faster than the current second level of world rallying. Slapping a bigger restrictor on it is a start – but it’s not the magic fix either.
How can more be extracted from Rally2 engines without raising costs?
“That’s a little bit the way,” says Loriaux of modifying turbo restrictors to generate more grunt. “It’s difficult because you’ll say bigger restrictor and more power but that’s where the problem is, that if you want a cheap engine it needs to be based on a road car engine and a road car engine that pulls more power than the current Rally2 is going to be difficult.
“We’re going to have to cast cylinder blocks and cylinder heads – but then that increases the cost. My personal opinion is that you should probably find a single casting of cylinder head and cylinder block that’s the same for everyone and then you [the manufacturer entrant] do the rest. But manufacturers are not really keen on that because they want their engineers. To me, if everybody gets the same casting of block and head, you still develop the rest and you can still engrave your name on the cam cover.
“It the end, in terms of marketing, we’re not at an era anymore where car manufacturers need to demonstrate their ability to make powerful internal combustion engines. That’s from the past. You’re not going to market your ICE, you’re just going to market your brand and be first, so that you don’t speak too much about the ICE.”
There’s reasons to be hopeful. The cost cap as currently presented appears unrealistic based on currently participating manufacturers’ comments – but a slightly higher one is still sought after. And there are ways to make it happen. The question is how aggressive the key players want to be – and how performance and engineering autonomy they want to sacrifice in the name of cost-saving.
