If they dont, most of the competitors will wait. If somebody wants Skoda, they will take older Skoda Fabia Rally1 Evo rather than Citroen/Hyundai/Ford...
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Is it also the most expensive among R5s?
Apart from the new Fabia, i20 is still pretty new as fiesta. Can we expext new generation from citroen/stellantis?
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Or turned around, under current rules I believe this Fabia is the last car to be homologated under current rules.
Either they change the rules (slightly) or we get completely new rules and R5/Rally2 will slowly turn into "historic" class like N4 Evo/Imprezas did when R5 was introduced.
Problem with changing rules just a tiny bit might be that both new and old cars still need to have about same speed. Even some 20 kg mildhybrid will be a weight penalty and probably very little power gain. We could see how endurance racing struggled when they tried to make rules for different drivetrains or configurations, be it closed cockpit vs open, turbo vs NA, petrol vs diesel or hybrid vs diesel. Usually one of the two options turns out noticeably faster.
With that many cars in the market, it is hard to kill the class.
And mild hybrid is a expensive dead end.
I could see a Rally2 Hybrid side class being created for manu teams and WRC2 primarly, with privateers and national championships run with old cars.
I can't, that'd threaten the existence of an already too fragile Rally1 whilst not serving the manufacturer unless they subscribed to the same costs anyway, something Skoda don't want to do either - but at least they have Rally2 sales, which would have to have hybrid forced onto the customer, which would only work if it's cheap, reliable, free IP... can't see it.
It might be coming to Rally1 soon though lol.
Are they still building new chassis of the old car? I thought they stopped that some time ago.
I still can’t agree on the logic with not running the new car. Apart from the promotion issue, I would have thought it would be quite useful for them to see how it performs on a real rally ahead of next season starting, instead of it just sitting around gathering dust for another few months.