HOW TO SOLVE THE WRC CRISIS
When you stand roadside on gravel rallies, you grow accustomed to the sounds and sights coming your way. There’s the initial, split-second lock-up as the left foot stabs the middle pedal, the frantic anti-lag clatter as the right foot rises from the throttle, and the satisfying transmission clunk as cogs are descended on final approach. Finally, there’s a flash of revs or the drag of a handbrake-induced slide to rotate the car at the apex.
Where to look? If you try to watch the approach, you’re going to miss what’s right in front of you. Neck muscles simply can’t compete with the sheer speed of a current-generation World Rally Car.
You need to understand what the World Rally Championship can do to people; it engenders outrageous emotion. It moves grown men to tears, like the bloke standing next to me in Portugal in June. The one word I fully understood was ‘Quattro’. Clearly, he was reaching back to the halcyon days of the mid-1980s. I nodded and smiled, but that worried me. Sure as bust followed Group B boom, those days were gone in an unsustainable four-year flurry.
Now, for very different reasons, I fear we could be heading down the same cul-de-sac. The last month or so has been among the most turbulent in the history of the championship.
A quick recap: we’ve lost Rally Australia, Rally Chile, next season’s WRC launch at Autosport International, Citroen, and now Skoda as a factory team in WRC 2. No matter which way you
