Toyota World Rally Championship driver Sébastien Ogier supports the idea to alter the format of rallies in order to shoehorn as many rounds into the calendar as possible.
Last month, FIA rally director Yves Matton confirmed to DirtFish that the governing body was considering adapting the structure of events, an idea initially proposed by M-Sport team principal Richard Millener.
Six-time champion Ogier would be keen for such a proposal to come into fruition as it would reduce the number of days personnel would be away for.
“Definitely making the car cheaper will be one of the steps [to keep the WRC attractive and] then you can also look into the format of the rally,” Ogier said on the latest episode of DirtFish Debates.
“Maybe trying to make it a little bit more compact. I’m pretty sure we’ve been talking about this idea for a while and trying to have two intense days of competition will maybe be enough. And try to reduce the amount of time that the team have to go out.”
Ott Tänak, the man who took Ogier’s world crown last year, agrees with the Frenchman and believes shortening rallies could make the sport ” a bit more efficient” and avoid the contest growing stale.
“As Seb mentioned, it’s not only the car and the regulation and the cost of running the car, it’s also many other things,” he said.
“It’s running the team to the races, it’s the way how the race has been built up, it can be a lot more efficient. All these things. I believe that these days the people are so kind of confident that they want something that happens now, it happens for a short time and then afterwards things start to go for too long.
“It starts to be boring. I guess, yeah, the format of the rallying has been like this for quite a long time. There are many other areas where it could be a bit more efficient.”
