Quote Originally Posted by Mirek View Post
The question shall be what is the point of having R4 when they are nearly as expensive as R5 while the R5 are way faster?

The history proved many times that in motorsport customers don't buy less expensive but slow cars because the sole purpose of motorsport is to compete not to save money.

Can You imagine someone spending 200 thousand Euro to buy an equivalent of gr.N car, i.e. second tier car in national and third tier car in WRC events?
I’m only speculating and I agree with you; top privateers will use faster R5 cars (and the less resourced ones will still have to use their old Evo's or Impreza's, as R4 will be inaccessible to them!), but looking at the current situation it’s clear that there's a much larger number of manus that are not involved in rally.

Somehow, R4 can become their entrance door to the sport. Will they use it in a massive way? In that case will they eventually pressure local ASN's to turn R4 into the leading category at national series (and even the FIA in the regional ones) or at least force a sort of BoP with current R5’s?

For sure it's premature to ask all these, but in spain N5's already won gravel rallyes (using a 34mm restrictor) and even the fact of being less competitive than R5's on tarmac didn't stopped Renault Spain to make a N5 Clio (actually, Fuster will start it next weekend).