R-Classes News

[MJW]

Personally I am sceptical that Citroen and Ford will allow a change to the R categories, plus Mini have committed to the current "new wrc" format of 1.6T. However, there is a lot of talk of new manufacturers joining, and they are saying 2013, and new style rallies. Now I guess FIA and NOS and these potential new manufacturers are talking, so maybe there is something big about to be announced on Sept 8th.

[Sulland]

It seems strange that they kill off S2000 with aprox 250 cars made in a few years with several manufacturers, and then start the patchwork on Gr N that has one manufacturer active for the moment.

But lets see what they come up with.

My guess is that R4 will be made to be a spin off class from the new 1600T WRC, with a lot of parts standardized to keep the price down, but who knows ?
Hopefully they are able to make a strategic sound plan with the Top R class, and from a date say that from today all cars allowed in international rallies must be R1 - R4 or WRC.

The old Gr N and A cars will then be for only National series.

[Mirek]

In fact only Subaru and Mitsubishi want R4, all other manufacturers prefer S2000 based cares.

[Sulland]

Yes but now Mitsubishi has pulled the plug as well, have they not ?

[navtheace]

Personally I am sceptical that Citroen and Ford will allow a change to the R categories,

Remember that it is not about if Citroen and M Sport will allow the change or not, it is not up to them.

They have to follow the rules set by the FIA or not compete.

The current S2000 cars have become 'obsolete' already. People are dashing to sell their 2 litre S2000 rally cars knowing that they will become very hard to repair due to the manufacturers getting rid of all the spares etc.

Same will happen with S1.6T cars in a few years. Where will you get body panels for them?

One only needs to look at an early Impreza world rally car compared to Impreza GpA. Where does one get body parts for the world rally car Impreza?

[Mirek]

In my opinion You give too much importance to something what actually is just a minor secondary problem and don't see the real primary problems.

Yes, You're right that it's sometimes difficult to get spares for 10 years old cars. But such cars are anyway totally obsolete for any higher level of rallying and usually also banned from any FIA competition because of expired homologation. They are useful only for enthusiasts or for some club level competition, nothing else.

By the way something like Gr.A formula doesn't solve this problem anyway. It's much easier to get any spare parts for Octavia WRC than to find proper gr.A center differential for Escort Cosworth.

What is the real primary problem is that FIA must somehow make the manufacturers to create the cars. That means FIA must attract them to spend huge amount of money and time to work on it. I can assure You that manufacturers really don't care if their cars are easy to run by privateers after ten years of using. In fact it's opposite. They need to sell new cars, not to just supply old cars. Not mentioning zero marketing effect of already non-produced models.

Just have a look on numbers. Gr.N formula failed to attract anyone. It's here for ages and we still have only two cars - Lancer and Impreza and it's very unlikely that some other manufacturer joins. The fact that it's easy to build and service gr.N car is in fact a disadvantage for manufacturer as he is often out of that process and makes no money of that. They are well aware - that's why Mitsubishi put a lot of traps on bodyshell parts from which You can recognize evolutions - such as Evo IX built from Evo VII. It's easy to do so but Mitsubishi has no profit from that so they forbade such rebuilds and forced FIA to check it regularly.

In the same time You have 10 different S2000 cars homologated by FIA in just 4 years and more than 250 cars sold to customers with high dependence on manufacturer service. That's what manufacturers like as secondary services give reasonable profit potential.

What is also very important for manufacturer is the cost of such car - especially development, establishing and running production and after-sale service. For all of this Gr.N/A is the most expensive variant of all possibilities. I'm speaking about manufacturers and their needs as they decide if they start the program or not. To produce production based rally cars it's necessary to develop stock sports car from scratch, to establish production lines, to find market for such expensive sports car and to establish service in dozens of countries. Alltogether it requires thousands of people, let's say at least five years and costs billions. On the other hand to make S2000 based car is very easy for manufacturer and much less expensive. They can just use external companies with experience and suitable facilities such as M-Sport or Prodrive and don't care about anything else. It's proven that this way works.

[ProRally]

Remember that it is not about if Citroen and M Sport will allow the change or not, it is not up to them.

They have to follow the rules set by the FIA or not compete.
.....

Carefull, 'normally' it has to pass the manufacturers commission and both Ford and Citroën and lots of others are there....

[ProRally]

Yes but now Mitsubishi has pulled the plug as well, have they not ?

Ralliart is closed, but Mitsubishi will go on. There is small group of people who will still do homologation and follow up on parts, which still can be bought.

[navtheace]

Carefull, 'normally' it has to pass the manufacturers commission and both Ford and Citroën and lots of others are there....

This is the interesting part of how it works I guess.

Back in 96/97 when World Rally Cars came in, I guess the manufacturers were involved with the decision. Yet, over time they left the sport one by one as they didn't like how rallying became in many ways.

Citroen and M Sport will be on one side, subaru and mitsubishi on the other. Then you have other manufacturers and teams also present putting their views in.

F1 seems to be like this when manufacturers all team up to put proposals to the FIA.

[Sulland]

Carefull, 'normally' it has to pass the manufacturers commission and both Ford and Citroën and lots of others are there....

Who are the members of this commission as of today ?