Quote Originally Posted by the sniper View Post
If the sport comes down to a level where privateers can afford to run a WRC season, the costs will equally be low enough for manufacturers to have a program for relatively negligible cost. Especially if there's presumably still a market for selling cars to privateers in your scenario. In your doomsday scenario, Formula 1 could be decimated very quickly, but rallying could weather the same storm, as it can theoretically downsize costs very quickly while maintaining a largely similar product.
In the light of the Renault news, F1 might end up with just Ferrari and Mercedes as factory teams. Haven't been following F1 for some time, so not sure how to classify Alfa Romeo. But F1 really don't rely on manufacturers filling the grid.

Rallying itself would survive, but what I'm more interested in is how will the current crisis affect the manufacturers' involvement. Car manufacturers are in a quite similar situation to the airlines as both are losing money because there are considerably less people buying their products/services. And all the changes in employment will affect the future spendings of people, who will most likely postpone big expenditure. Plus the drop in travel industry will affect car rentals. On top of the drop in sales, there's still the pressure for the manufacturers to make their vehicle fleet greener. And those developments are expensive and different manufacturers are already working together to reduce development costs. Manufacturers also have lots of debt, which needs paying.

We need to keep in mind that big corporations are run by finance guys in the first place and their only aim is to earn profit and spend as little as possible.

Five months ago I would had thought this doomsday scenario is bonkers, but like I wrote in the previous post the world is very different now. And we don't even know when life will be back on normal track.