Quote Originally Posted by denkimi View Post
You are missing the actual point here.

What attracts manufacturers is publicity. What creates publicity is fans watching. And what attracts fans is spectacle and drama.

Hyundai happily pays much more to sponsor the football WK in qatar than they do to sponsor rally, because it gives them more exposure.

Going electric, as electric cars are today, will just cause a big loss in spectators, making it even less attractive to manus.

Rally shouldn't care too much bout manufacturers, they must put what fans want in the first place. Lots of fans will attract sponsors and manufacturers, not the other way around. That's what made group B such a succes.
2017 WRCs were basically Group B revival. They worked to attract manus and fans for 3 years.

But by end of 2019 the manus started dropping and new ones (Skoda) did not join.
Did the spectacle and drama drop? Nope. Did fan numbers drop? (I don't have facts but I doubt it)


So how come they dropped? According to your explanation everything should have been fine?

How would redoing the same thing again re-attract manus? It wont.


Rally is a combination of spectacle, drama and "normal looking" cars on "normal" roads. You can't just drop one of the sake of the other. F1 or WEC never had the last two parts. They will always have closer fights (cause the cars are on track at same time) and things like Rallycross will always have more "fast" spectacle.

With regards to spectators and electric it depends:
- electric cars can be spectacular in different ways than petrol ones and for a short time you will have "novelty" effect
- for the future you need to look at younger spectators, the 60+ old men talking about 80s will not be main customer group much longer. When I take my son to rally he wonders why there are no electric cars when everyone drives them and they accelerate much faster.





Quote Originally Posted by Sulland View Post
I tend to agree.
A gamechanger would be to get a rally version of "drive to survive"

Interrest of F1 has exploded since they got that series, why not also in rally, where the best drivers are and many more areas of drama.
This I totally agree with. It hugely boosted F1 popularity, last time rally had anything similar was "Engineering world rally" in 2007ish.

Promotion is not directly related with rules though.