Toyota announces WRC plans

[Simmi]

Honestly any works WRC is beautiful to me. I'd take a field full of ugly WRCs if we get great action and competition.


And I actually have a soft spot for that Lancer above. There was one running at Rally GB in the national event recently. Very distinctive.

[Mirek]

Your beloved Skoda's didnt always look so pretty either...

I don't know what You are trying to prove. I spoke about Toyota Yaris and not about any other car.

[Fast Eddie WRC]

I don't know what You are trying to prove. I spoke about Toyota Yaris and not about any other car.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... it doesnt matter what a rally car looks like and there have been many 'ugly' ones before..

And the Yaris does look better in tarmac spec than gravel, where all rally cars look bad.

[AndyRAC]

I liked that Lancer WRC, quite 'odd' looking, but it looks like a Rally car, and sounded quite different. I also thought the Lancer III & VI were the nicest looking of the Lancers - and all had that 'Mitsubishi' sound.


Anyway, they have 2 seasons of testing & development before entering. VW used 2012 as a test, while also using the Fabia S2000 ....Should they build a R5 version, and use it on selected WRC, ERC, etc events. Or will they just rock up at Monte (provided Monte is the 1st round...) in 2017 with a brand new car? It's going to be interesting.

[Fast Eddie WRC]

Did Toyota reveal if they will be doing selected events in 2016 ?

'EDIT: 'It remains possible the Yaris could run in the 2016 WRC, but a more likely scenario would be delivering the car to coincide with the new technical regulations in 2017.'

[Muchonen]

About ugly cars, do we all forget about 307? It's always good to see new manufacture and imo it's not that bad.

[AL14]

Who care if it's ugly?
It has to be a proper rally car that can challenge VW. The rest are details.

[Jack4688`]

When we're talking about a spectator sport I don't see how anyone could not care if it's ugly. Aesthetics are very much an important part of the appeal of a sport like this.

If WRC turned into a championship made up entirely of dull rallies with a lack of exciting corners/stretches of road, ugly cars that have shrunk way too much in recent years and that sounded worse than most road cars then simply the closeness of times on a leaderboard would not be enough to keep me interested - that's even if close competition and unpredictable championship battles could be guaranteed.

The WRC is supposed to be the pinnacle of world rallying and as such should be fought out by cars you and me can only dream of - not the car that grandma drives to the supermarket with a silly bodykit bolted on to it. Of course we can't expect 911s, Ferraris, Lotus Exiges, Nissan GTRs etc to be the cars competing for the overall WRC crown as it is still a championship for regular road car manufacturers. But touring car racing doesn't have to suffer the same drudgery that appears in the WRC - just look at the BTCC, WTCC and V8 Supercars, they're cracking motors!

For all of F1s ills they do at least seem to do things about poor aesthetics. They got rid of those stepped noses, having made do with the vanity panels for a while - admittedly it backfired with the noses from last year that looked like sex toys but it was rectified as soon as possible. Now they're talking about silly power outputs to keep fans interested. Then there's the WEC - it's got manufacturers interested because of the freedom they have to develop widely different hybrid systems. Plus fans are interested because they already have silly power outputs and there's a great variety in powerplants - Porsche V4 turbo, Audi V6 TDI, Toyota V8... And what has the WRC got going for it? Quite large wheel arches... Oh and those rear wings are unnecessarily large too...

[AL14]

My grandma goes to the supermarket with a i20, my father could have a Polo, my mother could have a DS3. So I don't understand why Yaris could not be amongst them.

By the way, I understand what you want to say. But if I have to choose between closeness of times and a beautiful car to watch I choose the first, and I think you too. Aesthetic can be somehow "important", or at least something to be interested in... But there are museums if you want to admire forms and shapes. Rally is about speed, performances and reliability of a car in a first istance. Aesthetics come after.

[Miika]

Honestly any works WRC is beautiful to me.

"Anything with a pulse."

After 2003-ish, there isn´t a single WRC class car that would get into my dream garage, cars that would have both the looks and the sounds.