WRC future

[AnttiL]

With Rally2 (+ or not), you could see immediately Ford, Citroen and Hyundai competing directly or through some private entity/ national dealership /Satellite teams. Toyota would have no issue building a Rally2 car

Remember that Citroen does not have a factory team at the moment. It would be a different effort to run the whole season with three drivers than to do some development and run Østberg's car on a handful of WRC2 events.

Just because some manufacturer has a car does not mean they would join in as a manufacturer team. Remember VW with the Polo R5? Even Skoda ended their works team for this year.

I like the idea of factory teams, but semi-official teams may not be that different. You would not get the service park hopsitalities and plethora of engineers watching their screens, trying to pretend that this is F1, but who cares ? I am an old fellow now and my most vivid memories of rallying was mechanics servicing the cars by the roadside. This is certainely long gone, but a small(er) size service park would not do any harm..

Most likely the mobile servicing was also expensive with a lot of staff and vehicles and a big planning to do before the event. But I agree that we could do with smaller service park buildings.

The cheaper / more standard the category would be, the more competition between multiple drivers. Privateers could compete on equal footing with (well) paid professionals - as it always was back in the days. And guess what : The same professional drivers and well organized teams would (almost) always win - because they are the best. How many times back in the 70's did a Bjorn Waldegard or a Hannu Mikkola get beaten by another Escort ? Never. But how many times did we get "second" tier driver have "their" day and challenge for the win, getting a podium here and there ? Often.

I think you said it yourself. And we've seen the same happening in WRC2 in the past years when Skoda Motorsport was practically unbeatable with the amounts of testing they were able to do, find the perfect settings and give seat time to the drivers. Even with "equal" machinery, the factory drivers will always have an advance.