Quote Originally Posted by AnttiL View Post
But Tour de Corse used to be one of the longest events, not by the number of days, but by stage hours. The drivers would spend four hours on stages a day, the same amount a 1000 Lakes Rally would last in total.

Rallying was more endurance based up until the Group B ended, then it became more speed oriented. Even the "Grand Prix" event, 1000 Lakes Rally used to have just two legs until 1985, a normal Friday evening leg and then a second leg which lasted for 24 hours with only lunch and dinner breaks, driving all night with no sleep in between. I think it's fair to say that you don't race it up to the tenths of second on the last hours of that leg.
That’s the point I was trying to make; more than the number of competitive days or total stage kms, what keeps puzzling me is the short effort drivers are subjected each rally day. Driving around 140 competitive km’s for a little more than 1 hour in a full day leg is simply too short and looks a bit effortless; obviously it isn’t, especially considering the high performance of today’s cars, but nevertheless there’s room to make each rally day more physically demanding.

Instead of the 9 to 5 we could have a 6 to 12 (am/pm) marathon leg comprising 250 stage kms, with one or two service halts and an inline route replacing the boring ‘morning/afternoon’ identical loops. With this one only big leg on Saturday, plus a proper qualifying stage on Friday and a nice SSS run for Tele purposes (without counting for the classification) before Sunday’s podium ceremony, I honestly believe that we could get a new breed of sprint WRC events, more exciting to see and follow. In addition to those 10 or 12 short events we still would need 4 grand slam iconic events (Monte, GB (RAC inspired), NZ and Argentina), with 3 or 4 competitive days and a 600 stage kms limit.

I know, this is daydreaming as, like many of you already said, it’s not expectable to see big layout changes under the current exciting WRC environment. We’ll probably have to stick with some random event replacements and pray to Rally Gods for keeping manus loyal to the series.

Btw, even if WRC events became shorter after Gr.B, the real revolution was at the beginning of the 00’s, when Mr. Richard took ISC control and imposed the single service park, the clover leaf format, the 9 to 5 schedule and Sunday’s mini leg. All this, allegedly, to bring TV and mass media into WRC; 17 years after we’re still looking for them…