The brouhaha that emerged following the running of the Rally Australia night stage was either a potent climate change for the WRC, or a bit of a dust-storm-in-a-teacup, depending on your viewpoint. And social media has been literally groaning under the weight of all those viewpoints being expressed.
Despite the seemingly endless repetition from both sides of the argument, debate is of course a very positive and healthy thing. There has arisen an apparent need to get this topic aired and for the proverbial dust to clear, much like the physical stuff.
Coffs's night stage is something new to the event and the organisers and the FIA/WRC camp are keen to embrace such things adding individuality and novelty to the WRC carousel. The WRC promoter has shown a keen interest in adding quirky touches to foster, in its opinion, greater interest in what it clearly feels is a tired format.
Naturally, some drivers and fans would rather leave things pretty much the way they were, which has resulted in handbags-at-dawn sniping and outrage-soaked social media snarking aplenty. But is it all as bad as it seems? A dispassionate look at the viewpoints actually seems to show that the two sides are in fact in violent agreement. Let's take a look...
Night stages are inherently dangerous
Yes. They are. As are daytime stages, dangerous for drivers, administration personnel and spectators. I mean, this is motorsport we're discussing, and it's risky when compared to say, croquet, or lawn bowls, or beach volleyball. But clearly some risk is inevitable. That's what makes motorsport so... well, exciting really, and explains its popularity to many.
Disclaimer here - I personally have watched many night stages over the decades, and after the first one, to me they became rather "meh". In fact, my memories are less about the rally I was watching than the icicles on my mustache, or the alien vision of staring at glowing lights appearing and disappearing inside clouds shrouding a distant peak like something from Close Encounters.
But that had bugger-all to do with the performance of the teams. I get that some spectators like their motorsport to have an other-worldly atmosphere and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a matter of preference and it should be accommodated, right? Maybe not.
A little anecdote here...
Me, my brother and a couple of mates wandered into a special at Maramarua one moonless, overcast night, guided only by the glow of a pocket flashlight. From the stage map, we knew how many bends into the stage our preferred spectating spot was and about 20 minutes later we climbed a bank and settled in to await car 00.
We nattered among ourselves as one does, about ladies and life and cars, and at some point during that chit-chat, my brother let rip a long and loud bottom cough. The night erupted with the laughter of fifty or sixty disembodied voices of a crowd that we never knew were there. Flashlights and cigarette lighters flicked on, revealing that we were surrounded by a legion of other rally fans, scattered about the roadside in either direction. We had absolutely no idea they were there.
To anyone who earnestly believes that marshalls can control spectators on a night stage, may I respectfully suggest you're kidding yourself. If you can't be seen, you sure as hell can't be controlled.
Dust is just another condition that's a part of the sport
That's true. Much like fog, mist and cloud. Like snow, ice and rain. Like mud and flood. There's nothing we can do about the climate, so the competitors and teams should really just suck it up, right? Maybe not...
The one driver who gained the most from the hanging dust at Coffs was a certain Sebastien Ogier as first of the top drivers on the stage. Yet he felt strongly enough about the subject to use some of his end-of-day interview time to tell the world that he was opposed to putting drivers, marshalls and spectators at risk where hanging dust was not simply a possibility, but a probability.
As the driver who has been the road-sweeper on the first two days of all the gravel events this season, he clearly rankles over the lack of fairness he feels is inherent in the current rules. Changing the start order would benefit his performance as far as sweeping goes, but the opposite applies to the hanging dust. So why did he make his views known so publicly? The only possible answer is that he felt the combination of dust and darkness took the situation from acceptable risk to unacceptable.
And that's where the two opposing camps' arguments derail themselves. Organisers have always had the right to cancel a special if in the CoC's view, the dangers outweigh the desire to continue, and this season, a number of stages over multiple events were cancelled for that reason, even after cars had successfully completed the stage in question.
Drivers and teams can also petition a stage be cancelled in retrospect if the circumstances of the stage result in unfair advantage or disadvantage to specific competitors' performances, including the premise of force majeure - probably the exact type of natural circumstance that could have been present on the Coffs night stage. Except nobody petitioned. And that was likely a result of some drivers holding the opinion that safety wasn't compromised sufficiently to warrant it.
There are procedures in place to deal with problems created by nature and other unexpected incidents on the stages, so perhaps those rules should be allowed to function as intended. Which isn't to say that drivers and teams can't have an opinion about things they feel disadvantage them - simply that they run the risk of looking like poor losers, or whiners or snivelers.
Where does that leave us?
There are two things at play in the Coffs dust-up. The first is the questions of night stages. As I've said, night stages leave me cold, often in more ways than one. If I never see another night stage in my lifetime, not a single tear will I shed. If the teams and drivers and organisers want to run them, that's their business as long as acceptable levels of safety, whatever they may be, remain. Spectator safety doesn't deserve to become the pawn in a political arm wrestle though, to mix a couple of metaphors.
The second is the road condition, specifically hanging dust. What to do, what to do... (wrings hands).
Well, keeping the rallies away from dusty events would work, but that would effectively remove two or more of the current venues from the championship and that's highly unlikely to happen. Or the organisers could substitute a tarmac night stage for the gravel one, which wouldn't be any more disappointing than the Michael Rodent 'super specials' that we see now.
But really it was the combination of both things on the one stage that triggered the dust storm at Rally Australia. Will we see a dusty night stage in Oz next year? I doubt it. But I was wrong before - once if I remember correctly.
See you in Corsica...
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