Chile is coming close to becoming the second WRC event in South America alongside Argentina, with an expected debut in 2019.
It will run a candidate event a week before next year's Rally Argentina and is close to agreeing terms for a full-scale world championship round. The decision as to whether it becomes the 14th round will be made by the WRC promoter and the FIA.
WRCP chief Oliver Ciesla said that such an event, based in the city of Concepcion, would likely be popular with WRC drivers.
"We are very close to an agreement,” he said this week. “It would be a forest-based rally with really nice, smooth roads, with stages going from sea level up to 6,000 ft in the mountains. From what we have seen, Chile would by no means be behind where some of the events are right now."
Rally Chile organiser Sebastian Etcheverry said the WRC would certainly be hugely popular in his country.
"Rallying is the second biggest sport in Chile behind football,” he added. “We have run the RallyMobil series for 18 years and a WRC round is the next step for us. We are ready for this.
"Our stages – which are mainly wide and fast – are probably the best surfaces in the world for rallying. We have a lot of forest roads and they have to be maintained with compact gravel to allow the trucks to pass in different weather conditions. In the city of Concepcion, we have close to two million people with plenty of hotels and infrastructure."
With China and Croatia apparently out of the running in the near future, Japan is another event pushing for a 2019 WRC date. That country would run an event based close to Toyota City on the nation's main island of Honshu. That rally is also currently working with WRC Promoter GmbH. Toyota itself is understood to be pushing hard for the event and wants it to get a calendar slot ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Chile has a well-established rally culture but has never before hosted the WRC. Japan, on the other hand, ran in the WRC five times in the 2000s, based most often in Obihiro, on the remote North Island.
