Your claim was that there was no privateers in the 80's which was not true. And 80's was not good for privateers which shows how deep trouble we are in.
That was my point and you actually validated this.
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My point was more like "there was no competitive privateers in the 80's". There has always been privateers in rally, from the 50's onwards. But it's a different thing when they have been competitive. I have seen some footage from the 60's where a journalist is asking the clerk of the course of 1000 Lakes Rally, what should be done to make the privateers more competitive (in terms of practicing and route difficulty etc). So it's not a new thing for the 2020's.
The exception was in the Group A and early WRC era when some individual drivers got a good car and managed to get a good single result like Kytölehto in Finland, and even those two were due to low entries in factory teams (for example Mitsubishi with just one competitive car) and technical issues for factory entries.
from what i know first hand, related only to italian stuff, fiat, abarth, lancia, but also in the gr a era with subaru italy i.e. most of the "privateer" was in fact satellite team, entered as privateer but funded by the manus and directly controlled by them, used as lab, testing or to grow youngster and engineers, in many case it was just the national championship division running the wrc event as a privateer.
And 250/yr Group A in 90s, it provided the capacity for the satellites and privateers back then that doesn't exist today. And, the 20/250 were still related to the initial 200/2500 'street' production that justified it being a championship for production manufacturers. In 2022, there's no extra capacity and at 1 serious manufacturer that justification has gone IMO.
Why can't a Williams, Haas or AlphaTauri build a Rally1 car? Oops I forgot: because it's too expensive.
No, is it a big ask to be corrected if I'm spouting shite? M-Sport have Ford approval, for required entry in the manufacturers championship and there's R5 projects haven't been homologated because there was no manufacturer support. I've never seen a Haas driving on the street so maybe they have them in other countries?