FIA rally director Jarmo Mahonen has stirred up a hornets’ nest with his plans for more and shorter stages in the WRC, with fans reacting furiously to his suggestion.
Mahonen essentially wants more formulaic rallies visiting the service park three times a day with stages of about 10km each. Mahonen says he sees no future in the sport retaining an endurance element. His point was that, with teams spending millions on their service park encampments they expect more emphasis on them, particularly to keep VIP guests entertained.
But even the team bosses Mahonen was trying to please seemed to disagree. Hyundai chief Michel Nandan said of the plans: "Rally is rally. Each event needs to be a little bit different. For the organisers it’s difficult to do a stage that’s more than 50km because of the number of marshals you need.
"But if we only do 10km then I don’t know if it’s really good. If you want this short discipline then there is rallycross or circuit racing. I agree rallying has to adapt but each event has to have its own particularity. It’s true that when you have more stages then you have more to talk about but to say we need 10 stages of 10km or less, then this is not in the DNA of rallying."
Such feelings were echoed almost universally, with only Toyota boss Tommi Mäkinen backing Mahonen: "These cars are more like race cars. I don’t think they are built for endurance like in Mexico. More and shorter stages mean more social media and more coverage."
But one leading driver thought: "10km stages? What’s the point? I take his point about the 80km stage in Mexico, but the problem was that it ran on Sunday morning, when everything was decided. If we’d run that stage on day one, everything could have happened. I think endurance is a real part of this sport and always will be."
WRC promoter Oliver Ciesla admitted there was still room in the championship for some diversity. However, he also said: "If you don’t follow a certain pattern then you have no chance for the media to follow the sport. Don’t forget the attention span of young people today is eight to 14 minutes; what do you want with an 80km stage? They will do something else!
"The sport must adapt to what future generations want. If we don’t do this we will go out of business. At the same time endurance remains an element. We have to cover 300 kilometres on the stages and 1,200 on the road. This alone is an endurance element. We can still have a 40 or 50km stage on a Friday morning, but I don’t want a 50km stage on a Sunday morning that will send everybody to sleep before the highlight… the power stage."
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