[WRC] News & Rumours 2019

[stefanvv]

Only 2000km between them! Its like Rally Ireland-Poland, but with an ocean in between instead of other countries.

Ireland-Poland is also overseas, no?

[Tauri_J]

Estonia - Latvia would be really good

[doubled1978]

Wales - England - Scotland....3 countries right there....wait, didn’t we used to do that?

[AnttiL]

Estonia - Latvia would be really good

Rally Estonia is already situated quite close to the border, and behind the border Rally Alüksne wouldn't be far either.

[Franky]

Estonia - Latvia would be really good

Think bigger. Poland-Lithuania-Latvia-Estonia-Finland

[PLuto]

But you should think also about business issues. To organise a WRC event, you need to have big budget, support of local government or also country government. If we take for example Estonia and Latvia - which country should be first in the name of the rally? Where should be main base of the rally? How it will be with money from sponsors - latvian sponsors will go through latvian organisers company and estonian through estonian organisers company? Or both will go only through one company? And will be latvian organiser (and also government) interested in supporting event which main base is Estonia and all the money goes through estonian company? And there should be lot of similar issues...

[GravelBen]

Ireland-Poland is also overseas, no?

Good point! Only little bits of sea though.

[the sniper]

Definititely better idea than Turkish-Greek rally

Well that'd be one way to get Cyprus back on the calendar...


I can only really see this working well with Monte Carlo, working on the basis that you'd want to drop the French and Italian rounds from the calendar in order to let new countries in. Given the event's tradition of historically having starting points around Europe, you could get away with something similar to what the cycling Grand Tours have with the starts and opening days being held abroad. So with the Monte you could at least easily include the Sanremo/Italian stages before moving to the usual French stages. If the French can't be stripped of their own round they could be influenced to move their round back to the North East, then you can include Belgium, Germany or even Switzerland if there's interest. All have hosted starts of the Tour de France...

With France, Italy and Germany looking like being in the most peril, I imagine it's with this in mind that Todt has spoken. He's not talking to us, I imagine he's trying to influence the thinking of organisers in those countries. It's the easiest way to reduce three rallies into at least two anyway.

[dodge33cymru]

Makes a lot more sense to cross some borders than, oh I don't know, do a stage in Buenos Aires or Mexico City on Thursday night. The '1 day in Norway' works well for Sweden IMO and probably helps organisers offset costs.

[Rally Power]

If countries join forces to organize much larger events, like World or Euro football cups, why can’t they also do it in the WRC?

The WRC is spreading worldwide and it seems we’ll get fewer events in Europe in the future, despite a growing offer. Honestly, Todt proposal sounds better than loosing important events for the series (probably on a ‘who’s paying more’ selection) or going back to rotation (some time ago the promoter suggested 3 years in/out, which seems too long).

Maybe 2 countries events are a sort of utopia and they’ll never happen (at least on a larger scale than the Sweden/Norway case), but it’d be interesting to have a proper try.