This week’s Rally Turkey will run to the same coronavirus protocol as Rally Estonia earlier this month.
FIA rally director Yves Matton told DirtFish the governing body had learned more about running an event under COVID-19 precautions, but there would be no change to the framework Appendix S provides to all involved in the series.
Matton said: “For sure we learned things and I’m sure we’ll learn some more. Estonia is the first time we applied the guidance to be back in motorsport – Appendix S – with an extension of what they did for Formula 1.
“This is working really well. For sure there are a lot of constraints for the stakeholders, but this is the only way to run motorsport for the moment. It’s not easy for anybody.
“We don’t see anything changing for Turkey [in terms of running the rally], but like we see with everyday life, things are changing with coronavirus all the time.
“I’m sorry to say, it’s difficult to answer questions when things are changing so much.”
Photo: Hyundai Motorsport GmbH
Once again, the service park will be split into high and low density groups, with the teams, the FIA, WRC Promoter, the event organization and crews remaining on one side of the divide with the vast majority of the media on the other.
Turkey’s COVID-19 case numbers have been rising again throughout the last month, with around 1500 new cases and 50 deaths per day. Turkey has had the 18th highest number of cases in the world, with 290,000 and 7,000 deaths in a population of 84 million.
Estonia, by comparison, suffered 64 deaths in its population of 1.3 million.
