WRC future

**mknight** · 13th January 2021, 12:34

Originally Posted by pantealex

What I have heard:

...biggest reason was/is safety. They still haven´t found way to make hybrid system safe....

Originally Posted by pantealex

Toyota has many different hybrid systems and have studied those but they haven´t found way to use those safely enough
...
Safety problems is "the KEY"
Remember that weight balance of car must be as low as possible, very hard to make safely with "up in the Ass of Timo" kind of stages.

I find this extremely hard to believe. In a 2022 hybrid the battery does not need to be very large afaik (haven't seen any details). Certainly not on the order of the whole car bottom like it is on production cars.

How hard is it to place it behind the seats in a hard+soft shell when it is say 200 kg and the size of two two spare wheels max?

There are some 7+ million EV and plug in hybrids on the road in the world right now. They do crash, just like all other cars. How many horrific stories of deaths/injuries from those crashes you have heard of ? I noticed a few burned cars with no injuries (cause the fire starts slowly), that is all. For sure any story related to the battery would be blown up on all front pages.

WEC hybrids had 300 kg battery systems and they did crash at quite high speeds. F1 has had hybrids (without batteries) for very long etc...

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As to why nobody tested the car yet.
The first "public" 2017 car tests were spring/summer 2016 (think it was VW). MSport and Hyundai cars first appeared in late summer or after that. That was with quite small changes and without any pandemic and now we should think it's strange they haven't tested in second week of January?

**Fast Eddie WRC** · 13th January 2021, 15:42

And didnt the WRC put back the date the teams must be testing the new cars to July 2021 ?

**Fast Eddie WRC** · 13th January 2021, 16:06

MSport were cracking on with the new car during lockdown last year. They should be well into testing soon.

https://www.motorsport.com/wrc/news/...w-car/4795754/

**Rally Power** · 13th January 2021, 16:42

Originally Posted by AnttiL

I posted the same thing in the Bar thread but it's relevant to bring up here:

Rallying is different to most motorsports in the way that the cars need to be road legal to complete the road sections between special stages. The current rally cars are always basically a tuning kit installed on a normally manufactured car. I have believed this is a reason why rallying cannot be done on prototype cars, and also why manufacturers must homologate the rally versions.

I don't know how we could make a privately built prototype car (for example Prodrive Super Turbo Rally1) street legal. We can't assume every country can make a waiver to their legislations that non-registrated rally cars can be allowed to drive on public roads. Maybe someone who knows these things better could explain or confirm my doubt.

However, it's a different thing if we want to allow some other garage to be able to tune up a base model street car to specs of a rally car. At that point we come to the question whether some manufacturer allows their brand to be used as a modified version (like when you have a VW Polo Proto with Mitsubishi tech inside, you cannot call it VW).

Also, I don't know how the street legal thing is handled with the 2022 regulations when you can build a tubular spaceframe scaled down car which will only look like its street model, but be totally different on the inside. Remember, in Group B there was always a matching street model (with 200 cars built).

I also doubt that a private team would have the budget to develop a car from scratch and run a season with it. Manufacturer money is much needed in this sport.

The road legal thing isn't a issue; in Rally-Raids there are tubular chassis protos from all sizes and shapes and they're free to use open public roads on liasions. Besides, road homologation of a one-off protos is done by national certification agencies, not by the FIA; it may be easier in some countries than others, but once a proto gets a valid plate it can go anywere.

On having a rally car tuned up on a garage from a base model, that's what Rally2-Kit already allows and Victor Cartier Yaris is a perfect example.

Anyway, in Rally1 case we're not talking about home made protos but on top private tuners machines, probably funded by big companies that would get an incentive to be more involved in the sport with a less strict FIA homologation system. As Red Bull has been showing in F1, the marketing value of becoming a full entrant it's way higher than just to sponsor an existing manu team.

**pantealex** · 13th January 2021, 18:18

Let´s put it this way:

2022 car rules were made long long time ago

Do you really believe that lack of "quite small hybrid component" is the reason that Teams haven´t started building their 2022 cars ?

6 months testing could be enough but why every Team is just "waiting", only because of that missing Hybrid system ?
FIA for sure has delivered all tecnical information about it to Teams (weight, size etc.)

I hope I´m totally wrong with my "stories" but we will see...

**seb_sh** · 13th January 2021, 18:40

I'm not very confident about the future of the WRC and the 2022 proto hybrids. Unless they are cheap to make and they allow non manufacturers it might be a dead end. Maybe the next rules should have simply been an R5 based car, maybe with a standard hybrid to tick the box.

Also something to consider, when WTCC died they went to TCR rules where the are only "customer" teams. Ok some of them are almost official teams but the cars are cheap and there are many privateers and championships all over the world. GT3 is similar, customers and semi works teams only and many many privateers all over the world. Maybe WRC should have gone that way. The only problem is those series are BOP so sometimes the winner is determined in an excel sheet. On the plus side the variety of cars is huge compared to any other era and the battles are tight and fun and the balancing is mostly ok, you can tell as they are ALL complaining about it so it must be pretty equal

**NickRally** · 13th January 2021, 20:19

Originally Posted by Rally Power

The road legal thing isn't a issue; in Rally-Raids there are tubular chassis protos from all sizes and shapes and they're free to use open public roads on liasions. Besides, road homologation of a one-off protos is done by national certification agencies, not by the FIA; it may be easier in some countries than others, but once a proto gets a valid plate it can go anywere.

On having a rally car tuned up on a garage from a base model, that's what Rally2-Kit already allows and Victor Cartier Yaris is a perfect example.

Anyway, in Rally1 case we're not talking about home made protos but on top private tuners machines, probably funded by big companies that would get an incentive to be more involved in the sport with a less strict FIA homologation system. As Red Bull has been showing in F1, the marketing value of becoming a full entrant it's way higher than just to sponsor an existing manu team.

That's a pretty spot on description of the situation regarding the road legality of potential independently prepared rally cars.

RS · 14th January 2021, 18:31

Originally Posted by pantealex

Let´s put it this way:

2022 car rules were made long long time ago

Do you really believe that lack of "quite small hybrid component" is the reason that Teams haven´t started building their 2022 cars ?

6 months testing could be enough but why every Team is just "waiting", only because of that missing Hybrid system ?
FIA for sure has delivered all tecnical information about it to Teams (weight, size etc.)

I hope I´m totally wrong with my "stories" but we will see...

Is it not actually quite a fundamental part of the powertrain of the new cars, and a fairly big change?

Have the teams not even had one unit to run dyno tests?