As someone said on the recent Dirtfish podcast, WRC should make the events an 'Adventure Experience' for VIP's, following the rally into the stages.
The current hospitality for guests in the SP structures is like a 'poor man's F1'.
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As someone said on the recent Dirtfish podcast, WRC should make the events an 'Adventure Experience' for VIP's, following the rally into the stages.
The current hospitality for guests in the SP structures is like a 'poor man's F1'.
I don't know about other rallies, but Rally Finland has a huge number of VIP guest paddocks on the stages, complete with catering, drinks, TV screens, celebrity hosts, even helicopter flights. It's a big business, mostly run by individual entrepreneurs, not the rally organization. I know that not all rallies have the terrain to make it, but the open fields allow you to put up a tent and give space for helicopters to land. Probably Colin's Crest in Sweden has something similar?
https://dirtfish.com/rally/stohl-its...l-electric-now
Here’s another view to the future.
Don't think it's doable in the very near future as the charging grid is not so widely spread. For some reason I presume the charging times he mentions are with the highest power output.
And that's not even to think about the potential safety hazards.
But from a marketing point of view, it could be good. Just think how many automobile manufacturers are trying to find their way in the EVs currently.
Yes, lots of challenges still for full EV's, but still promising to hear the charging wouldn't be an issue.
EV's should have their own series or class before being taken to WRC level. It doesn't happen overnight.
To give some perspective here (in a positive way), a high performance motorsport battery, i.e. the F1 kind for example, can be fully charged in less than a minute, it takes a design with proper cooling to achieve this, but it is and has been doable for many years now. Life may not be as long as the battery in your mobile phone, but neither is the F1 or WRC IC engines' longevity as good as the one in the average road car. The problem is it takes vast amounts of power to charge these batteries in less than a minute, which in an F1 car is available through the extremely "violent" braking events, but obviously significantly less so at the average roadside charging station. So the ball is entirely in the charging facilities court currently as far as motorsport on "open" roads is concerned. We need service vans with 1MW diesel generators on the back positioned strategically along the route or chasing the cars :)