For too long Sunday driving had been a problem. Following the rally in real-time, it rarely seemed to matter if the first few stages of the day were missed or not.
Have a lie in. Wait for the powerstage. What was the point of doing anything else amid tire saving?
That raised the question of a separate set of tires for the powerstage. Wouldn’t matter; you’d still have drivers locked in formation, not pushing the limits, anyway. Big gaps are formed by Sunday. This isn’t the old days when you had a hope of gaining 30s in one stage; the margins are too fine now.
So the teams and the Promoter attempted a fix. This new points system; everything until the end of Saturday gets one set of points, then Sunday gets its own patch of points, plus the powerstage bonuses remain.
Plenty were unconvinced by the new system
So complex, isn’t it?
Not really. A vocal minority huffing and puffing about how change is bad was always going to happen, even if the system was great. The real problem is a failure to package the change correctly.
It was billed as Super Sunday; an attempt at hyping up the new importance of the final day. But all the comments were similar: this is too difficult to understand. Bin it. I don’t want to use a calculator.
Watching the rally live, it seemed the WRC had forgotten to actually highlight why Sunday was suddenly super. Perhaps they were distracted by the dying embers of the lead fight, focused on whether Ogier would somehow mount a miraculous comeback to head off an imperious Neuville. But the new gimmick was largely ignored.
Ogier's chase for a record-extending 10th Monte win may have distracted some
This points system is not that hard to grasp. It was just poorly sold.
You want to talk about complex points systems? Look at NASCAR. Don’t ask me how it works – I’ve no idea how many points are dished out at any given race.
But, frankly, I don’t care. I don’t need to.
The stakes are clear and the objectives each driver needs to hit are communicated in real time in NASCAR. Watch a race during the Playoffs and you’ll see this in action.
Takamoto Katsuta’s curiosity got the better of him during the Monte and he started doing numbers himself, rightly pointing out that you can win the rally but still end up with fewer points than the guy who finished second.
Not a problem in NASCAR. With its playoffs system, if you win, you win. You are ‘locked in’ to the next phase of the competition regardless of how many points you accrued between stages (yes, they have an allegory for daily points!) and the final result.
The single biggest moment of NASCAR’s recent history was not even a battle for the win, either. It wasn’t a battle for the championship. It was a guy going from 10th to 5th, because the points system meant he’d stay in the title race and get to start the next race on an equal footing with his rivals.
Ross Chastain dumped his Chevrolet into a wall, on purpose, and rode his car along said wall to slingshot past five of his rivals. Not to win: just to get a few extra points that kept him in the title race.
“That’s literally the coolest thing I’ve seen in my life,” commented Chase Briscoe over the radio, as he watched the #1 car zip past him riding the wall. It remains the coolest thing that’s happened in NASCAR.
The thing is, this move confused no one, from a points perspective. One of the most sensational moments in NASCAR history happened because someone needed a couple of extra points, not because they were trying to get a race win – and everyone watching understood the stakes and how many places he needed. Because the context wasn’t points: it was places.
This is not a call to simply graft NASCAR’s points system into rallying. That’s not the point here: it’s the principle. Simply going backwards to having a set of points for how the drivers finish does not work in the modern era of rallying because the stakes are different now.
Last-minute breakdowns from unreliability are rare, video footage of every stage is watched over and over by crews, and margins have tightened. The classification simply will not turn on its head in a couple of stages towards the end.
Incidents like Ott Tänak's 2019 power-steering failure in Sardinia are very rare
The game has changed. So how the game is scored needs to change to reflect that.
What we have today is probably – or hopefully – not the final version of this system. But complaining that it’s not understandable – that’s a symptom of how it’s packaged, not how it’s designed.
Rallying is a long-form discipline in a short-form world. We must adapt. We must find a way to both tell and reward the story of the entire rally, not only the order they rock up to final time control in. And instead of talking about the last day being a ‘Super Sunday’, we need to highlight why all the days that preceded it were also superb in their own way.
Perhaps the mistake was using Saturday night as a single line to split the system. Cutting up what already existed annoyed long-time fans with a traditionalist mindset and the way they sliced it isn’t easy for someone unfamiliar with days or legs as a format.
Bridging the divide between traditional mindsets and modern approaches is key
You know what is easy to market? Endurance points and Sprint points. You still count Endurance points as being time elapsed from the first stage to the last; that confusion about whether there is a ‘reset’ for Sundays goes away because Saturday isn’t considered a breakpoint anymore.
For Endurance, the narrative is clear: you must persevere, you must cover every mile and do so while balancing risk and reward. For the Sprint? Again, it’s just the Sunday results.
But then there’s what these Endurance and Sprint concepts can bring beyond the score charts. Think about what it could allow: Sprint-only events, where national rounds that are hoping to someday be a ‘proper’ WRC round, can show they’re ready for the big time. An easier way in for other markets to tip their toe in global waters. And there will be more opportunities beyond that.
A new points system is no bad thing. A change was needed. It’s just a question of narrative and designing a product that makes a 6am start exciting rather than feeling like a chore.
