If the World Rally Championship is searching a 14th round for this season, it could do a lot worse than Switzerland. Geneva.
The good and the great from the WRC are spending so long at the home of the FIA these days, the might as well bring their cars and crack on. Why are they there? To create and craft our future. Weeks after week, we’re getting closer to the final word on 2022.
Towards the end of last season, I was getting increasingly frustrated at what I saw as a lack of movement towards Hybrid. Why couldn’t they just get on with it? How could the teams work towards the new cars when they didn’t even know what the new cars were supposed to look like? Or sound like.
Who would be supplying the hybrid kit? Who knew? Tenders hadn’t even been submitted.
Everything seemed to be running late.
It was a conversation with one of the WRC’s most senior technical brains that gave me some insight into the actual size of the task.
Now? Now I’m impressed with the progress made. Yes, we need to be quicker and the teams need more time, but the teams will adapt. They’ll make the Monte a year from January.
But the need for hybrid has never been more obvious. We lost Rally Australia to bush fires in November and folk who know an awful lot more about climate change than I do tell me that’s directly traceable to global warming. Yes, bushfires are a perennial feature in the New South Wales bush, but 50-degree temperatures feeding and fanning the flames are not.
And last week, well I think we all know how close we came to losing a second WRC counter in three due unseasonable conditions. It’s vital that the WRC can add meaningful words to this climatic narrative and, from 2022, it can.
Admittedly, running around six miles in complete silence isn’t going to save the planet, but it’s 100 per cent more than we’re doing right now. It’s a step, the beginning of a journey. Without starting that journey, make no mistake, our sport is finished.
What’s complicated the process and, no doubt, added to the delays is the laudable effort to cut costs. When 2022 was first talked about, the party line was that these cars wouldn’t go any quicker than the current cars and they wouldn’t cost any more than the current cars.
That’s all changed. In some cases, a target price of €500,000 is half what you would pay for a current World Rally Car – if you were allowed to buy one.
Navigating this week’s meeting will provide the governing body and FIA rally director Yves Matton with one of their biggest challenges yet. From what DirtFish.com can understand, Toyota’s as entrenched in its belief that the current Global Race Engine is the only way to part-power the future, while M-Sport Ford and Hyundai are similarly certain about moving to an R5, or Rally2-based motor.
Dogma will demand ultimate diplomacy to find compromise and solution.
Regardless, Matton’s talk of a 35% reduction in the cost of the cars is potentially sport-saving. The Belgian and the working groups that feed into him deserve absolute credit for the work they’ve done so far.
And that’s before we even get started on the new safety advances coming for 2022. A universal safety package inside the next generation of World Rally Cars can only serve to further improve what are already the safest cars in the history of the sport.
So see, you and I have been getting all cross about a perceived lack of progress, when all the time Matton’s been focused firmly on making our future brighter and, most importantly, sustainable both economically and environmentally.
