It’s a brave new world for rallying. The World Rally Championship is making a first step into flexible itineraries during the modern era, allowing rallies to run longer or shorter itineraries depending on organizer preference.
Rally Italy is going shorter. But what does that mean in practice?
Condensing the amount of time spent on the island is one key goal. Recce starts and finishes a day later than a typical WRC round, running on Wednesday-Thursday in Sardinia.
WRC Thursdays usually feature shakedown and are often followed by a rally-opening superspecial, with the ceremonial start happening in between. But in Sardinia, shakedown is moved to Friday morning and the first stage of the rally – the classic Osilo-Tergu gravel test – kicks the rally off properly the same afternoon.
In stage mileage terms the rally has shrunk by 18.65% relative to 2023, which had followed the standard three-day cloverleaf system. The vast majority of that stage mileage reduction is from the shortened Friday. Though there are two passes of Osilo-Tergu and and Sedini-Castelsardo stages on the first day, shoehorning the shakedown into Friday has been achieved by effectively cutting a full loop from the itinerary.
This shortened Friday is a double-edged sword for road order. No rain is currently expected on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, so the early runners like championship leader Thierry Neuville can expect to do plenty of road cleaning on the first two stages. On the one hand, there’s fewer stages to try and make a difference – but there’s also less mileage on which to cede time from sweeping before the order is reshuffled on Saturday.
The final day will also hand out a glut of points for a very short period of driving. Across the powerstage and Sunday classification 12 points are on offer for 24.4 miles of competitive action, or 0.49 points per mile. That’s the lowest of the season so far – though Finland in August isn’t far off that benchmark at 25.9 miles on the final day – 0.46 points per mile.
Speaking of shortening: Monte Lerno, the rally’s most iconic stage, has been cut in half, reverting to the same route it followed in 2020 and 2021 but with a slightly extended finish. The good news: Mickey’s Jump remains.
An unusual twist to Sardinia’s revamped schedule is stages being run in looped pairs, rather than a full set of stages run in morning and afternoon blocks – hence the ‘cloverleaf’ colloquialism. For example, on Saturday morning the Tempio Pausania and Tula stages are run once, then the drivers immediately return to Tempio Pausania for a brief regroup before running the same two stages for a second time. Other loops during the rally function in broadly the same manner.
Depending on how you look at it, that’s potentially good news for spectators. There will be close to zero idle time between passes; with 85 crews starting the rally and a mixture of one, two and three-minute gaps between them depending on car class, the second pass of every stage will begin approximately half an hour after the first ends.
So, to conclude: Friday’s going to feel a bit weird. Rolling up to the starting ceremony without having first completed shakedown will probably feel a bit odd too. Saturday and Sunday are quirky with their revamped loop structure. But it’s still got WRC-level mileage – no European Rally Championship event comes close on length to Sardinia’s revamped 165-mile itinerary.
There’s a certain irony that one of the slowest and most technical events of the season will be over in a flash. But it marks the first step towards more diverse itineraries in the WRC. Making each stop of rallying’s world tour more unique is a positive step forwards – even if there’s the occasional step back in itinerary length.
