Quote Originally Posted by Kenneth View Post
To the topic if private tuners can carry the championship - of course they can. Dakar/W2RC basically works like that. Dacia is Prodrive, which run their own team even before Renault entered, Toyota is Overdrive, Mini is X-Raid, and many of other cars without manufacturers' backing is there too. etc. etc. There always were and always will be bunch of privateers, full factory teams were really an exeption.

And as it was already mentioned in this thread, there were many attempts to build a rally car from private tuners, that ended on the need of manufacturer backed homologation.
But this is the DNA of rallying. The Manufacturer provided the car and the tuners ran it. Without the Manufacturer (homologated) car there was no car.

WRC and all rallying would have to change completely for cars to be built and run completely by private teams.

Rallying using all kinds of non-road car based vehicles just isn't the same.