With the World Rally Championship’s future regulations still not officially formalized, a series veteran has one suggestion.
Ditch hybrid.
Battling through Friday afternoon’s stages of Acropolis Rally Greece without the use of the hybrid kit fitted to his Hyundai i20 N Rally1, Sordo was reminded of life pre 2022 when the WRC introduced hybrid power in tandem with the Rally1 regulations.
And he preferred it.
“Yeah, all the three stages with no hybrid,” Sordo told DirtFish, “so it was at least more fun with no hybrid and managing the power and this and that.
“This is like all time, it’s much better, you know. Throttle, brake and gas.”
Sordo doesn't enjoy the complicated nature of managing the hybrid system
In essence, Sordo misses the simplicity of driving without hybrid, and feels the WRC would be more fun for drivers without it.
“For sure, because sometimes it’s working, sometimes it’s not,” he added. “I don’t know, it’s not my decision, but of course it’s nice.
“And then you can see in some places it’s the same, they don’t have hybrid. But to drive is much more fun and natural: come in the throttle to manage a little bit with the gas, not with the hybrid.
“Now it’s charging, now it’s not, now it’s coming the power and all. A little bit weird.”
The next set of WRC regulations, streamlined for 2027, are set to leave propulsion options open to manufacturers, so there will be no requirement to run a hybrid unit.
“The automotive industry hasn’t kind of worked out where it’s going and we feel the best option is to have something that, you know, a manufacturer can come along and they have the freedom to adopt what they want. So I think for me that’s very positive,” Robert Reid, FIA deputy president for sport, told DirtFish.
“I think we’ve got some interesting stuff for ’27,” he added. “The question always was, unfortunately, how do we get to ’27? We would have liked the output of the review to be, ‘here’s the vision for ’27, here’s where we’re going’.
“Everybody always picks up on, ‘yeah, but what about next year?’ and blah, blah, blah. So we explored a couple of, I think, sensible options you know, three options basically.
“Do you stick with the current cars and accept the amount of entries you’ve got? Do you tweak the current cars in the hope that that would bring more private entries? So do you take some of the complexity off? And I think the two areas of complexity at the moment from a driver’s perspective are hybrid management and aero.
“So a lot of – and Mārtiņš Sesks has kind of proven the opposite, which I’m really happy with, but a lot of Rally2 drivers I think are concerned to move up because they think the learning curve will be too difficult. It’s a big investment and they won’t get a return on that investment and they will risk being made a fool of by the current cars.
“So, I think it was a sensible thing to explore is, I don’t know who coined the phrase, Rally1 minus, but to explore that. So, that was one option. Keep the current cars was the other option. The third option was, well, actually do we base it on Rally2, because that’s a very popular format, and maybe we differentiate a little bit if that’s going to become top category?
“Maybe we add a little bit of aero, maybe we do a one mil tweak on the engine restrictor, something like that. So I think there were three very sensible options. The Rally1 one, nobody really kind of thought it would make much difference. The Rally2 plus one, you know, we spoke to the manufacturers involved in Rally2 at the moment. They’re very clear, it’s a customer formula.
Rally2 has been so successful because it is a customer-based formula, says Reid
“If it became the top formula, they would not be interested in that because it changes the business model. And I think within the regulations, it’s another learning we’ve had that a Rally 2 car is built to a price because you’ve got to sell it. If you didn’t have the price limit on a Rally 2 car and you were building it to win a world championship, you would spend a lot more money and you would get OK marginal gains, but you would get some advantage over where the car is now.
“And then you have the pressure of the current manufacturers saying, ‘look, we would rather just stick with what we’ve got’. So it’s kind of unfortunate in my mind that all the discussion has been about now and next year and ’26, and not this vision, which I think is what we need to be concentrating on and painting for ’27 onwards, because we’re not going to attract a new manufacturer in the next two years when the formula’s changing.
“So all the focus has to be on getting the regulations right for ’27 and we’re on track to do that and focus on that as a future.”
The target, however, for the existing Rally1 regulations was to attract more manufacturers to the WRC, which hasn’t happened. In fact, things have almost gone the opposite direction with Hyundai’s commitment beyond 2025 far from guaranteed.
Hyundai's long-term commitment to the WRC isn't certain
So in hindsight, was Rally1 a mistake?
“Difficult question,” Reid responded.
“I mean, I think Rally 1 is massively impressive. It’s arguably technologically complex. It needs a big commitment from a manufacturer. I think because we haven’t increased the number of manufacturers, you could probably say, yeah, it hasn’t necessarily worked.
“From a competitiveness in the championship, I think it’s been very good. You’ve got three manufacturers able to win three different styles of car. I think from that perspective it’s been good and I think it gives us a good platform and confidence to move forward with tweaking it for the ‘27 car.”
