Quote Originally Posted by mknight View Post
The main reason for adding hybrid was because the manus (Ford and Hyundai) demanded it to stay in WRC. More precisely demanded that the cars will be hybrid without caring about the hybrid specs at all.

The main goal of the rule set then done by FIA was to keep the car behavior as similar as without it, to be able to use the same petrol engines and to keep the costs on same level as 2017 cars (looks like the last part failed).

So the hybrid was added as a autonomous automatic unit that the drivers can't directly control, with a small battery and even more importantly strictly limited levels of energy use (limiting the amount of regen as well).
The goal was never to make the car as fast as possible or to make the hybrid radically change the driving.
Yep. Now that I look back, I wonder whether it was all worth it, and I think "Maybe". On the one hand, it pushed costs up and didn't do a whole lot. On the other hand, we still have a 2.5-team championship instead of a 1.5 or 1.0-team championship. That's assuming Ford and Hyundai weren't bluffing, which I am willing to consider.

And would leaving the hybrids off bring in other teams? Skoda wasn't going to enter either way. Citroen was verging on leaving, not joining. As for local importers building cars on space frames and so forth, I think it would take a lot more than dropping hybrids to make that happen (maybe 2027...).

So I can't blame anyone who felt that "it seemed like a good idea at the time". Desperate times, desperate measures.