It's very interesting question how much wrc-cars have developed in last ten years or five years. The overall question about developement has been raised last days not least due to Petter Solberg's Xsara project. There seems to be very different views present. Some forumers see that wrc is like F1 where developement happens with giant steps. At least one forumer seemed to believe that 2006 Xsara is four minutes slower than current developed cars. Other forumers seems to believe that the developement rate is slow and Xsara might be still pretty competitive.
My own belief is that developement in current wrc is very slow - almost nothing. It has been slow last five years. However there is no undeniable indicators and one has to read quite subtle sings in order to form opinion.
A) When one follows Formula 1 there is often changes that are identifiable with very high probabilities. One can see how cars relative performances concretically changes between the races. In current wrc there is very rarely points where performance-change can be confirmed very clearly. New Ford models 2003 and 2006 are in my view last remarkable changes - if Subarus clear backward steps are not counted.
B) Subaru's fate. It has been emprically confirmed that since 2005 any new Subaru has not been better than previous evolution compared to relative competition. Actually cross-comparison tells that some Subaru-evolutions were clear drawbacks. If Subaru has actually took backward steps how other teams could have done massive developement at the same time?
C) Comments from the drivers. For instance, according to Grönholm, Peugeot 307 didn't get any developements during the time span of one year. At the same time the relative competitivenes seemed to stay same. Last year Grönholm also said that there is no significant difference between Stobart Focus and the current works model (am I right there is difference of one year developement between M1 and M2?).
D) Comments from the engineers. For instance Christian Loriaux has underlined that the changes are extremely little and limited.
E) There don't seem to have happen any changes in terms of pace. The teams have been quite exactly as competitive in relation to each other during few last years. In my view this means that steps have been very little. Maybe the biggest identifiable step could be Ford's step before Greece in 2007. But later Loeb told that they went into wrong direction with set-up in that phase of the season and recovered to NZ when it appeared that they were par with Ford. In early season Ford+Grönholm was maybe 20 sec behind Citroen+Seb and the step before Greece and new homologation (after Greece) maybe gave 20 seconds that was lacking in the early season.
My guess is that Peugeot 206 in 2002 spec wouldn't be no more than between 1-2 minutes off the pace nowadays. And 2006 Xsara is very near to current cars, perhaps 20-50 seconds off the pace. This view is confused because those old cars have been in the hands of non-top drivers and the cars have not always been in the sharpest shape.
Opinions????
