David Richards hasn’t changed his tune. He’s changed his entire playlist. Before, he was all about the central service park and a World Rally Championship that was largely restricted for the elite.
Two decades on and DR’s gone all nomadic and man-of-the-people. He’s now advocating a more mobile service park and as many privateers as possible.
Richards is an easy target here. Yes, he was the one who introduced the cloverleaf format and yes, he was keen to keep a tighter focus on the entries; for a while it was 20-20-20. There would be 20 World Rally Cars, 20 support series cars and 20 privateer entries from local heroes. A 60-car field was easier to control for the rally organizers, and, crucially, for the television production.
And, at the time, he was probably right. It easy to scoff at a change of heart, but actually what DR’s doing is evolving with the times. What was right then, isn’t right now. And, it’s probably worth remembering, the foundations of formula he implemented in the early noughties were what helped make the championship more popular among manufacturers than any time before or since.
Hyundai's impressive service area currently dominates the WRC service park, but its days could be numbered
Perhaps it’s those busy laughing up their sleeves at what they see as a DR u-turn, that need to get with the program.
“It is,” said Richards, “20 years ago since I instigated that. Life’s changed. And you mustn’t be afraid to say we must change as well when circumstances change.
“Let’s just take Monte as a very good example. You know, the entry list for Monte was restricted to 70 cars because they couldn’t accommodate any more in the service park in Gap.
“Now, isn’t that ridiculous?
“You know, we’re restricting the private competitors, the competitors who are the bedrock of our membership, from competing on their world championship round because some of the manufacturers want to bring effectively car showrooms to our service park.
“We’ve got to try and work with them and accommodate that. But, at the same time, we’ve got to make more flexibility and help the organizers in this respect. We haven’t come up with a solution yet.
“The flyaway events, I think there are solutions there where we ask the organizers to put more infrastructure in place. So we reduce the carbon footprint of the amount of kit we have to fly around the world. That’s an important issue for us.
“As far as European events are concerned, we’ve got to look at what’s a fair and sensible template for this and just bring it back a little bit to more realistic levels.”
The time has come to stop looking back and start moving forwards. It’s been a long time coming.
