Quote Originally Posted by Backa View Post
Trying to make latter stages of rally to be more eventful instead of risk-free cruise is not really obsession. It is common sense, rally is professional sport, it has also business side and care about viewiership.
I would counter that with what I've seen on a lot of comments on Youtube, instagram etc. that 'Lappi should have pushed right to the end'. And I feel like that is the thinking the rule-maklers had when creating this system - because if he doesn't push until the last stage he doesn't deserve 25 points clearly. That to me falls into this obsession that 'every driver should push 100% every kilometre of the rally because otherwise we won't have enough entertainment to fall back on.'

Motorsports rule-makers these days (not just WRC) are too afraid of an event being a tense, hard to predict affair on occasion and think the solution is it must be 100% action the whole time. Instead there is a depth of different outcomes that can be allowed to happen in all forms of motorsport which help to make it even more exciting when you have an event which naturally results in two or more drivers going toe-to-toe until the very end.

Quote Originally Posted by Backa View Post
...I also think that leader or any other driver who has safe advantage with few stages to go should have some extra incentive to keep pushing...
Why? Take the old motorsport adage of 'the aim is to win going as slowly as possible.' I've bastardised that somewhat, so maybe someone can correct me and if it was Moss, Fangio or Lauda who said it. Sometimes you will have to push right until the end because your closest competitor is that closely matched with you that weekend. Other times you will be able to build a healthy lead then for the rest of the event perhaps reliability concerns or the rough nature of the event means it is sensible for you to not risk losing yourself and your team a win. To me there is no justification for a sport to say 'but that approach will earn you fewer points, that way of winning rallies/races is now frowned upon so get a wriggle on.'

The problem is the overall competitiveness of the sport, not whether the drivers have incentive to drive at a particular pace at a particular part of the event.