Estonia. It was a nice idea, but how could it work? Why would it work? Precisely. It couldn’t. It wouldn’t.
Those were the sentiments of the World Rally Championship hierarchy at the end of 2019. And Rally Estonia had resigned itself to life as a support act. A ‘promotional’ event which – thanks to significant investment in the building of roads and jumps in the countryside surrounding Tartu – would forever have a future as a Finland warm-up.
Rally Estonia, it seemed, was destined to remain in its northern neighbor’s rallying shadow forever.
Urmo Aava, the man behind Rally Estonia, was, is and always will be a pragmatist. If WRC Promotional event was as good as it was going to get, he’d take that.
So he did.
He took that and laid on arguably the best promoted event of the year. Remember 2019? It was the only event outside of the WRC which was contested by every manufacturer. Ott Tänak was there with Toyota, while Elfyn Evans represented M-Sport Ford, Andreas Mikkelsen and Craig Breen drove Hyundais and Esapekka Lappi ran Citroën’s C3 WRC test car. And there were further 2017-specification World Rally Cars for Markko Märtin and Georg Gross as well as a stellar Rally2 field.
Backed by Shell, it was a stunning event which took over Tartu for the weekend.
Those who were there wondered what this rally had to do to find its way into the world championship; it had the roads, the promotion and the competition. Sadly for the Estonians, just across the Baltic Sea, the roads had been around forever, with outstanding promotion and arguably the world’s best rally competition.
Then 2020 happened and the world as we knew it stopped working. Three rounds in and the World Rally Championship stopped turning.
Landing into round three, three years ago, the odds were infinitely long on departing Guanajuato for round four six months later. In Estonia.
Chile. Argentina. Portugal. Kenya. Finland. When they all fell, Aava and Estonia stood up.
It’s fair to say there was a degree of political disquiet in Estonia at the time, but the prospect of landing the dream unified the right people and had a country pulling in the same direction.
“Before the COVID came, the World Rally Championship was really closed,” Aava told DirtFish. “If you were a small market it was impossible to get in. But now we get the chance, Belgium gets the chance and other events get the chance. Strategies are changing through the COVID and I think it’s a very good step what the FIA and the [WRC] Promoter has done.
“Look at Latvia, this is another example of this. I think Estonia helped to make this change and we did this by being ready to go. [WRC] Promoter knows, we work for a long time with them and they understand that we can make things happen quickly. Our structure is always so well organized that we are ready.
“This is what we did in 2020.”
And Estonia did it with some force. Not only was Tartu making its debut in the world championship, it was doing so with every eye on it. Aava had nowhere to hide. Trip up and the world would be watching.
And tripping up was easy in the middle of 2020. COVID regulations, the FIA’s Appendix S, seemed to be changing by the day – such was the nature of a global pandemic. Planet earth was learning as it went and learning from its own mistakes.
Rally Estonia’s implementation of Appendix S in September 2020 was outstanding.
Estonia wasn’t so much up and running as flying high from the start.
All of which makes Aava’s pragmatism and magnanimous appreciation and congratulation for Latvia all the more surprising. Again, he sees the bigger picture for the sport.
“Long-term for the whole championship, the more competition you have for one place on the calendar, the better,” he said. “It makes events work harder, pushes them higher.
“The strategy of taking events and moving them between the WRC and the European Rally Championship is a really good one. We can rotate some of the smaller events, sometimes in WRC and then some years in the ERC. This makes sense and it can make the championship stronger.”
To that end, Aava will invite Latvian officials to Tartu to observe Rally Estonia this summer.
“People think I’m crazy,” he said. “I’m not. Honestly, I’m pleased for Latvia – they are also our neighbors and having a good WRC event there can help to grow our market as well.
“We need to think more to this, we need to think more as regions. Look at us here, we have Finland, Estonia and Latvia we can be strong together. If you stay in your own box, you can be in like a vacuum.
“The world and the sport is changing. As a rally family, why would we want to have the competition with organizers of other rallies? In a funny way, we should pick up the fight with the football [soccer] or basketball or some other sport, but not between each other.”
That the world changed in 2020 is beyond question and it’s through far-sighted folk like Aava that the WRC has evolved towards a leaner, more market-driven calendar than ever.
If a country wants the WRC badly enough, the dream’s there to be realized.
