WRC '16 - Is the WRC format flawed?

Much chatter in the motorsport media and social media about the health of the World Rally Championship is evident at the moment. It seems that our sport is going through some kind of identity crisis, judging by the number of words written about the topic, most of them, (though to be fair, not all) apparently critical. So what's causing this outpouring of angst?

 The vexed issue of the start order

It's not a trivial undertaking to solve this issue to everyone's satisfaction, which is likely why the current solution continues to be the World Rally Champion's bête noire. As the driver most likely to be opening the road for the first two days on most, if not all WRC rounds, Sébastian Ogier feels that the deck is stacked against him.

Lately, the motorsport media are tending to offer sympathetic murmurings, reminding their readers that the three-times World Champion is handicapped by the poor grip levels he experiences for the opening two days on each gravel event. And as far as that goes, the motorsport scribes are correct. Rally Mexico was a good example of that start order issue in action. 

Both Ogier and Latvala drove what were in effect faultless rallies, and despite Ogier's presumed superiority as a driver, (he is the three-time WRC champion after all), Latvala's lower road position allowed the Finn to consistently beat the Frenchman on the loose surfaces until the final day when it was too late to matter.

Of course, running further down the order doesn't mean anything much in and of itself - you still need to deliver a very fast, mistake-free performance which as we know, Jari-Matti did. In spades. But both he and Sébastian agree that the Finn's advantage was real, and critical. Latvala went into the final day knowing that he needed only to cruise for the win.

So what to do about it? Basically what Ogier is asking for, as it happens. Instead of deliberately handicapping the WRC Champion, in effect penalising him for being the best, neutralise the start order; dump the championship-order-as-start-order entirely and use the currently-irrelevant shakedown to generate something useful; quickest times over the [say] five runs allow the drivers to choose their start positions, locked in for the remainder of the event.

So now you have a shakedown that not only lets the drivers set their cars up for the conditions, but they will have earned the right to select the start position they believe most advantageous to themselves within certain parameters. And if this seems like deja vu to you, you're not imagining it - it used to be this way in the WRC.

It seems likely that the championship order start was cobbled up to counter the "Loeb" syndrome, where he was so much better than his opposition, that WRC followers seemed to have lost interest with the predictability of it all. But really, that's a poor reason to continue it. Yes, Ogier is hard to beat, but surely we'd rather see him being beaten fairly rather than lose through fighting with one hand tied behind his back?

A victory over Ogier will be all the sweeter for the new generation of WRC aces if there's greater likelihood that they actually deserve it.

Can we get rid of the stupid half-day final day?

I know I bang on about this, but jeez, unless someone makes a total balls-up of their final feeble smattering of Sunday special stages, what's the point of even having the rally continue on Sunday? By then, the finishing order has already been decided, the drivers have weighed up the possibilities of gaining or holding or losing a place and decided to risk nothing, and instead, have settled for bringing it home as it stands on Saturday night. It happens (see Rally Mexico). Too often, in my opinion.

It's not even possible to sneer at the drivers or the teams over this regularly-occurring state of affairs. It's down to the fact that there's just not enough stage mileage left in the "half-day, final day" format to make up the deficit to the guy in front. So what to do about it?

First we need to understand why it happens. And it's down to WRC promoter. In order to get their business in front of sufficiently large numbers of money generating audience members, the promoter is determined to put it on the telly. That's it. The only reason there's a half day's action is for it to shoe-horn the event into a higher-rating time slot on live TV in the only version that can be packaged successfully for that media. And it's the power stage that meets the need, which is why it's also the last stage of the rally.

You could, if you wanted to, leave the power stage around that middle-of-the-day-in-Europe slot, televised as it currently is, yet have another three or four stages preceeding and/or following it. But in order to squeeze the maximum excitement from the televised stage, the promoter has intuited that combining the power stage points with the overall victory must be even more thrilling for the viewing public.

Except it's not necessarily true at all.

The reality is that the power stage is a contrivance - something that could be applied to any other stage in the rally and mean absolutely no more or no less than the current fashion of being pasted onto the last stage. In fact, including the power stage mid-day-ish for Europe, and running another three or four specials around it, would more likely provide excitement levels far higher than the foregone conclusion scenario that is the last day as things currently stand.

Except... the TV audience that the promoter is gunning for isn't the rally fan who has been following the event with fascination since the shakedown. It's the casual petrol-head whose mindset is for 60 minutes of TV that shows basically all the action there is in that one broadcast hour, including the podium champagne spraying that he/she is so familiar with.

It's not about rallying at all really. It could just as easily be a hillclimb. Or a bent sprint. Or a motorkhana...

So how to fix it? The short answer is to get another promoter, one that understands the rally concept, one that isn't obsessed with live TV. A promoter that actually wants to make the last day as exciting as the other two longer competition days. One lives in hope.

The longest stage

The penultimate stage of Rally Mexico was a whopping 80km in length. Not since 1986 apparently, has such a marathon special graced the WRC and a significamt number of heartbeats have been expended dissecting and debating its merits. The opposing factions in this debate are those who see the WRC has drifted from its roots as a championship series where once it was human-and-machine against the elements as well as against other humans-and-machines, and those who find the so-called "sprint" nature of the current WRC to be less predictable, more accessible and more exciting. 

These days, goes one argument, it's all too homogenised, too much "flat out" and nowhere near enough "overcoming the elements" while the other side argues for "high speeds", lots of "jumps" and all in a relatively compact, "easy-to-spectate-at" format.

Give them their due, the Rally Mexico organisers made a brave decision in inserting their 80km marathon stage into a championship that was used to the idea that 40km was massive. But to be fair to the skeptics of the "marathons are good" notion, the Mexican organisers have since let it be known that they don't intend to repeat the monster stage.

Their reason is that it's just difficult to plan and execute and the possibility of it going awry is simply too great to warrant the effort required. WRC promoter has gone on record as claiming that the stage's length added little to the uncertainty of the outcome (ironic perhaps, coming from them), and in fact made the action less interesting and less exciting. No doubt there will be many more words written on the pros and cons of these developments. Suffice to say that it's unlikely that we'll see another 80km long stage in the WRC as long as this promoter rules.

When you think about it, you could fit a couple of 25km stages and a 30km jobbie into that marathon length which could have resulted in three different winners. Or not. But that's the beauty of more stages - more possibilities. And while the subject of stage lengths is out there, I'd prefer that the minimum stage length was never less than 7km, even for super specials, and that to me, 12km sounds like the right minimum for most rallies. But I don't actually get to vote on that, so...

One thing that stood out for this writer was the lack of enthusiasm from the drivers for the 80km mega-special. Not that their views would necessarily have any bearing on future stage length, but I suspect that the tepid reception from the drivers means that the pro-marathon camp is in for some disappointment in their dream of a return to the past glories of the WRC.

The shortest stage

You know what this is about - those Super Special Stages that are the magnets for attracting the casual rally-spectating public, most of whom have clue zero about the crews they watch duelling on the [mostly] sealed surfaces on which such stages routinely happen. And even less knowledge of the state of the WRC championship.

The rationale for the SSS is easy to express though, and even easier to defend. The format generates an area of crowd interaction and party atmosphere which draws massive audiences to the event and not a little money for the generally cash-poor rally organisers. So what's the problem?

Well, it's not ever going to add a great deal to the spectacle in terms of the actual competition. Frankly, it's difficult to get excited about short bursts of light and noise that promise much in the way of possible damage to a crew's prospects while offering little likelihood of reward in terms of advantage over one's competitors. That's a lot of risk for bugger-all gain.

In Mexico, at the end of Thursday evening's Super Specials, World Champ Ogier held a paltry 1.7 second lead to take into the rally proper. That's the competitive equivalent of a sneeze. And it's on these Michael Rodent stages that we regularly see drivers who are probably not going to trouble the time-keepers, actually taking the fastest times. Clearly they become magically quick whenever they are tasked with negotiating Super Specials.

Or maybe the drivers who are actually in contention for scoring points (and perhaps even winning) simply see that the rewards are outweighed by risks involved, and choose to cruise. And who can blame them? As many a notable driver has muttered in the past, the rally can't be won on a Super Special but it can certainly be lost. 

It's reached the point that I simply cannot get excited about who gets what time, and I confess that I rarely follow such stages. For me the rally actually starts after the opening SSS, and any others that are scattered throughout the remainder of the weekend are to be ignored for the money-generating sideshows that they are, however necessary to the organisers.

How to fix that then? Well, if the stages were longer, say 7km+ or so, then that might conceivably encourage the crews to actually "have a go" rather than fanging about in Hollywood fashion while keeping their precious rubber intact. And maybe also offering a bonus point or three on each SSS would add enough motivation to the process to generate genuine effort to win the things?

Could be, could be...

If you think the above is simply so much bovine fertiliser, feel free to share your reasons in the comments. Or if you agree, don't be shy about saying so - just keep the conversation expletive free and try to be kind. Okay?