Yes. No. Maybe. No. Yes. No. Sure? Yes. It’s no. In a line, that’s the World Rally Championship’s story of electric motors and big batteries in the last three years.
Hybrid is out. Finished. Gone. Or it will be once next week’s Rally Japan is done.
So, there’s time for one more volte-face in the Far East?
That’s not even remotely funny. In the 51-year history of world championship rallying, it’s hard to remember more indecision over the technical regulations. The full realisation of the WRC’s hybrid vacillation was hammered home on Friday afternoon while in conversation with a Formula 1 colleague.
“I didn’t think your lot were running hybrid next year anyway,” opined my lens-looking pal. “Didn’t you say the initial contract was only for three years? ’22, ’23 and ’24?”
Her memory was too good.
“That’s right.”
“So what happened?”
“How long have you got?”
Hybrid had a storybook beginning with a Sébastien Loeb vs Sébastien Ogier battle for supremacy on the Monte. The end to its story has been less glamorous
Not long enough. Amid some, no doubt, extreme raising of eyebrows, she hung up.
If you’ve got time, maybe you and I could share this one.
Remember the initial announcement of Rally1? Even that was fraught with discord and ridicule. Some wanted it, some didn’t. Some wanted the ultimate hybrid rally car, others wanted something sustainable – both economically and environmentally. The Rally1-ers won out and the battery boost was going to be a real thing.
Through 2019, the development costs would be divided equally between the four teams: Toyota, Hyundai, M-Sport Ford and Citroën. Not long later, Citroën walked leaving a quarter-sized hole in the budget. The FIA stepped in as a fourth ‘investor.’
In March the following year, Compact Dynamics was named as the single supplier of hybrid. More quarrels. Some of the teams wanted a single supplier, others didn’t. You’ll notice, in the last three years, the word ‘Hybrid’ has never once appeared on the boot of the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1. The Japanese manufacturer had been running hybrid in road cars for two decades and, justifiably, felt it would be well capable of providing its own battery-motor solution. The decision was taken to go down the single supplier route to contain costs and ensure parity of performance.
As 2020 moved into 2021, there were concerns at the delayed arrival of parts. The tubular chassis common to all cars, designed by the FIA, was ready to go. The engine was carried over from 2021 as was much of the transmission. All that was needed was the 100-kilo battery and the motors to feed into the powertrain.
Hyundai was last to the party for testing ahead of the hybrid era – and it showed
Mule cars ran with ballast through the summer of 2021 before they were plugged in in September. Running stopped soon after it had started, with an email sent from Compact Dynamics’ Munich office requesting the teams stop running and send all parts back to them.
From then on, almost on a weekly basis, leading into Monte Carlo, 2022, there was another phone call to DirtFish with another story about how the whole Rally1 thing might not have been the best plan.
Then on December 4, 2021 the rally world held its breath. Thierry Neuville had crashed Hyundai’s only test car. The car had gone off the edge of a cliff and fallen 30 meters. Onto its roof.
It’s still haunting to remember the Belgian utter the line: “There was one drop and one hit. Simple as that.”
The FIA’s spaceframe chassis saved the lives of Neuville and co-driver Martijn Wydaeghe.
That crash just about typified Hyundai’s run into Rally1. The board was ridiculously late in signing off on the project – that the Korean manufacturer even remained into the sport for 2022 came courtesy of then team principal Andrea Adamo’s absolute belligerence and determination to make it work. Round one was an utter disaster for the i20 runners.
It wasn’t long before we first heard the words: “I lost hybrid.”
The combination of a 3.9 kWh battery and 100kW motor offered an additional 134bhp, giving the cars around 520bhp off the line and, once regenerated, in 10-second boosts. It delivered the fastest rally cars in the history of the sport, bar none.
There’s no doubt there were teething problems with hybrid and the drivers were understandably vocal – losing 130-odd horses to their rivals is not something they were ever going to do quietly. But what was often overlooked that the ‘loss of hybrid’ was fixed with a simple powercycle: turning it off and on again.
The intital sparks of conflict over hybrid had begun to to die down in 2023 – but they would reignite further down the road
By the second year and into 2023, the hybrid story had faded into the background. There remained issues here and there, but pragmatism ensured a calmer response from the drivers.
So, when the news broke in May last year that there was no Compact Dynamics deal in place for 2024, there was much frustration among the crews.
An initial three-year agreement, it’s reported, hadn’t been extended, so understandably, Compact Dynamics couldn’t guarantee it would be in Casino Square at the start of this season. An extension was agreed. Normal service would be resumed.
Or would it?
The WRC working group was announced at December’s WMSC meeting in Baku. Robert Reid and David Richards were tasked with finding a way forward for the WRC. Hybrid would be gone. Maybe.
Two months later it was confirmed. Following a Geneva meeting, the FIA stated: “The current Rally1 car will continue as the WRC’s flagship vehicle in both 2025 and 2026 but with modifications to reduce cost and performance. These include the removal of the plug-in hybrid unit, with the performance compensated by a reduction in overall weight, and a reduction in the air restrictor and aerodynamics.”
Concerned at the prospect of having to re-engineer cars in a matter of months, the teams argued among themselves briefly before presenting a united front.
Four months on in Uzbekistan and the FIA had time to reflect. Actually, hybrid would stay.
“Technical stability,” it stated, “has been agreed between all stakeholders for the 2025 and 2026 FIA World Rally Championship seasons. The World Council has confirmed that, following extensive feedback and discussions, the WRC Technical Regulations for Rally1/2 cars will remain unchanged for the coming two years.”
And that technical stability remained. For five months. And four days.
By backing two separate lines of communication for sustainability, neither succeeded in building a strong narrative
FIA chief technical and safety officer Xavier Mestelan-Pinon explained the FIA’s third u-turn in a season: “Following extensive dialogue with key stakeholders, it became clear that continuing to use the plug-in hybrid units provided under the existing supplier agreement was no longer in the best interests of the FIA World Rally Championship.”
And there you have it: the WRC’s fairly miserable history of hybrid.
Is it the right decision? For me, no. The right decision was the one we should have taken at least five years ago: remember the option for economic and environmental sustainability. Will history show Rally1 to be an expensive and unnecessary luxury the series and the sport could ill-afford? Quite possibly.
Did we really expect the world to view the use of hybrid as any kind of cutting edge or imaginative response to world rallying’s need to become more sustainable? Really? Even when Toyota’s hybrid Prius has been taxiing us around the world in silence for almost a quarter of a century?
As much as I was bemused by the headlining of hybrid as the answer from the top of ’22, I was frustrated at the apparent absence of promotion of sustainable fuel in the series’ messaging. The WRC was, don’t forget, the FIA’s first fully sustainably-fuelled championship.
We were trailblazers and that, for me, was the message to trumpet.
Let’s end on a positive. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem tells us he is committed to safeguarding the future of a sport which is so dear to his heart. That’s nice.
“By focusing on sustainable fuel and simplifying car technology,” said Ben Sulayem, “we’re ensuring the WRC remains captivating for fans and achievable for competitors.”
Took a while, but we got there in the end.
