2022 WRC News & Rumours

[AnttiL]

They talk about going green and being sustainable yet they make the crews go the long way round twice instead of staying in the southern hemisphere. At the very least they could put NZ straight after Finland, and then you have a longer gap between the two trips, but seeing they're only separated by Spain, they could easily swap between the two (Spain & NZ) and go on straight from NZ to Japan, at least for the drivers and teams it would be less work (and more eco-friendly).

The service equipment will take weeks to ship from NZ to Japan. And even if there were no rallies in between, the drivers would still fly home (and rally cars to rebuild) in between. The European events use their own service equipment, so it doesn’t travel back and forth. So it doesn’t make a difference really to have Spain in between. It has been the same often with Mexico-France-Argentina sequence.

Only way to make savings to traveling is to have two long-distance events situated close to each other geographically, and link the cars, like Argentina and Chile 2019. Likely some drivers traveled home in between, some didn’t.