The new FIA President feels Rally at the top level lacks real personalities, what he calla superstars.
Is he on to something, or is he totally mistaken?
https://dirtfish.com/rally/wrc/wrc-n...s-ben-sulayem/
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The new FIA President feels Rally at the top level lacks real personalities, what he calla superstars.
Is he on to something, or is he totally mistaken?
https://dirtfish.com/rally/wrc/wrc-n...s-ben-sulayem/
Mistaken IMO. It's not 1972, nobody cares for influencers or needs somebody with a voice to tackle political issues. Whether he's right or wrong, what can he do about it, what will he do about it? Nothing.
The allusion here is that WRC needs another Colin McRae i.e. someone who will transcend the sport and bring in new fans. Maybe the EA deal can help.
I think the personalities are there but the whole series lacks proper presentation for the big masses. There's no real effort to popularize the sport, no weekly tv magazines, no inside stories, no proper team presentation etc etc
The other thing is that for average Joe this sport requires more knowledge and preparation and patience throughout 3 days than your average sport like F1 or Football (the real one, not the Football which they play with hands :D)
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Colin was an unlikely organic star. He broke convention, team orders and arguably the rulebook in the era that WRC was open. You couldn't falsify that if you tried today. Rallying and car-culture isn't relevant to most people's lives now either, that's why they'll never bring in new fans. That's my wider answer to Colin constantly raising this topic especially with young people in mind. Doesn't matter how many TikTok followers or Insta posts with emojis (the obvious points) - they'll never own a car, drive it above 80kph or pull handbrake turns on a car park.
He's sort of got a point; the sport can't produce personalities who transcend the sport - and it's been like this way for 10-15+ years. For all the success of Loeb & Ogier, they are hardly full of personality. In fact, under the old promoters, we saw them trying when Raikkonen, Rossi, Kubica and Block who would take part, thanks to their huge fanbase - and interest in the sport. Didn't really do a lot though, did it?
And the big issue, the lack of decent free to air coverage; being behind a paywall is a problem they have to sort out, as it's one of many reasons why more manufacturers aren't showing up.
This is the fundament of the problem indeed. How can we expect people to even start getting interested into rallying if everything is blocked - I would say even "hidden" - behind a paywall? We have whole motorsport championships, even of great importance, on live stream for free. Absurd that they can't afford to broadcast at least a couple of stages per event for free on YouTube, to attract interest. Nobody is going to say "wow, these 2 minutes video of WRC highlights is great! Let me purchase WRC+!".
As for personalities, I don't care for F1 high drama media pushed personalities. I think that for something like that to come, we'd need bigger, invested fanbase... I don't think that all F1 drivers are these incredibly interesting "superstars" while rally drivers are boring people. It's just that F1 has way more fans, so it's useless to try and manufacture "rally superstars" without solving the base issues.
On Instagram, Ken Block has 6.7 million subscribers. Travis Pastrana has 4.2 million. Sébastien Loeb has 460k. Sébastien Ogier has 270k. Petter Solberg has 340k. Johan Kristoffersson has 88k. Stéphane Peterhansel has 17k.
For some reason, American rally drivers have been more successful on internet than Europeans.
They create more content than any european rally drivers.
I haven't followed Ogier, Loeb ot any other rally driver on Youtube as well. In the meantime I have followed KB and Travis for entertainment value only.
The same entertainment is given me by the guys who record rally tests. And given all of this I still have way way way more respect towards WRC drivers than everyone else.
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