WoRDA. What is it?
It’s simple, it’s the World Rally Drivers’ Alliance. The World Rally Championship’s equivalent of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association.
It’s been a long time coming and, truth be told, it’s been around a lot longer than people realize – just without the formality of association.
Granted, WoRDA has nothing on the GPDA, which can trace its roots back to Stirling Moss and the early 1960s, but it would be naïve to think drivers and co-drivers have been entirely passive in the progression of rallying.
But from the Monday after Rally Sweden, in the hours following a stewards’ decision which left Adrien Fourmaux fined €30,000 (€20,000 suspended for a year) for using the F-word to describe his visit to a Saturday snowbank, WoRDA was written in stone.
The time for action had arrived.
The time for action? That’s perhaps a touch unfair. In the same way the GPDA was ready to stop the show with a drivers’ strike at the 1982 South African Grand Prix, so the WRC drivers and co-drivers did impact on the result of Rally Portugal four years later.
After Joaquim Santos’s Ford RS200 slid off the road and into a crowd of spectators, killing four and injuring more than 30, the leading drivers and co-drivers had seen enough.
They assembled in a room in the Hotel Estoril and agreed they would take no further part in the event. Walter Röhrl, Markku Alén, Juha Kankkunen, Stig Blomqvist, Henri Toivonen, Timo Salonen, Miki Biasion, Tony Pond, Malcolm Wilson, Kalle Grundel and all their co-drivers signed a piece of paper outlining why they were going home rather than to the fourth stage.
Sadly, their actions were overlooked. The rally continued. Different times.
Drivers came together as a common voice in Portugal 1986 - but they weren't heard
When I first started reporting on the World Rally Championship, I remember Richard Burns, Robert Reid and Markko Märtin working with then FIA president Max Mosley to improve all aspects of the sport. There was talk of a rallying GPDA at that point. It was the same a decade down the road, when the crews met in an underground car park at a particularly warm Rally Sweden, with the likes of Kris Meeke and Sébastien Ogier trying to unify voices to take action.
On that occasion, there was no common voice.
But there was one Frenchman who was looking on, listening, plotting and planning.
Step forward eight -time world champion Julien Ingrassia.
Having retired from the World Rally Championship at the end of the 2021 season with a 54th and final World Rally win, Ingrassia would never venture far from the discipline he’d dominated for close to a decade. Crucially, he would remain in close contact with his driver Ogier and all the rival crews they’d battled down the seasons.
Co-drivers, as we know, are all about the detail. From the moment he arrived at rallying’s highest level, Ingrassia was somebody who clearly wanted to take that further. He wasn’t satisfied with just sitting in the seat, calling the notes and checking his watch. He knew the sport needed to change and he’s always been ready, willing and able to be part of that change.
Ingrassia has always been an accelerator and advocate for change in the WRC
Always an advocate for WoRDA, it came as no surprise that he would be central to it when it arrived. Ingrassia’s former Toyota team-mate Scott Martin is the crew representative at the WRC Rally Commission and, between them, they have formalized the World Rally Drivers’ Association in the days following Sweden.
Ingrassia holds no formal role in WoRDA right now, but he’s widely seen as the go-to leader in the same role Alex Wurz has held at GPDA for the last 11 years.
“All of my career, I was pushing hard on the safety, pushing to make this sport better and this hasn’t changed,” Ingrassia told DirtFish. “All of us, all of the drivers and co-drivers want to make the sport better.”
Fourmaux’s fine might have been the stimulus for change, but the foundations have always been there.
“This group has been together for a long time,” said Fourmaux. “We’ve always been talking, we’ve had a WhatsApp group and we’ve talked about all aspects of the sport. But now we’ve created WoRDA to help build the link between the FIA and the crews, between the crews and the WRC Promoter.
“This is about much more than drivers and co-drivers being perfect in 10 media interviews each day for the four days of a rally, it’s about making sure the crews have a voice that’s heard.”
Fourmaux confirmed the drivers and co-drivers have long had a WhatsApp group
The 30 members of WoRDA make for a powerful voice – especially when they’re singing from the same song sheet as their GPDA colleagues and cousins.
The power of words is known the world over, but rarely have words been so dissected and pored over as they are today.
Right now, and for understandable reasons, WoRDA’s work is centered very much on words. Looking through a broader lens, the formation of rallying’s GPDA will give a voice to the actors on the world’s best stages.
About time too. Bravo, Julien.
