Tubular belles

‘All of the cars are slightly different, where we’ve taken the regulations and adapted the architecture to how we want to best present our cars for overall performance’
Chris Williams, technical director at M-Sport

Rallying changed forever as the 2022 WRC season got underway in Monte Carlo. Since the genesis of the sport, competing cars have always been based on production bodyshells. Even in the radical days of Group B, the cars used limited run road car chassis. Though large chunks of the last generation WRC machines were chopped out to make room for rear differentials, and outer skins stripped away and replaced by carbon or Kevlar, they were still showroom models underneath.

The new era of Rally1 may look similar to last year, with pumped-up, steroid-fuelled version of the Yaris, Puma and I20, but none share a single major part with their common or garden roadgoing versions. Under the bodywork, now entirely composite in construction, sit tubular spaceframe chassis, encasing a spec hybrid system.

No longer are manufacturers constrained by rules tying them to particular models in their ranges, hence why Ford’s Puma – a mini SUV – is sharing space on the stages with Toyota’s Yaris shopping mobile, albeit a three-door, homologation special, thanks to the much-lauded GR version.

Staying alive

This then, is the future of rallying, and how we got here was best summed up by Hyundai’s now departed (and much missed) former team principal, Andrea Adamo. Speaking when the final details of the rules were still being hammered out, and before Covid threw the world into disarray, Adamo stated in his endearingly blunt fashion: ‘We need to be in a situation where a manufacturer can use the model that they need to sell. If we want to say alive, we need cars that will be acceptable to the marketing types.

‘It’s the manufacturers driving this sport, not the FIA or the promoters. Your board will tell you, this is the budget, I need to promote this model, end of discussion. There is no romanticism.

‘The alternative is you don’t have it. It’s like my mother, you