 FIA succeeds? No more 2 top rally championships? by Chris B
|
4-Apr-09 01:20 PM  |
Wow, just when I thought nothing could surprise me any more, Max Mosley comes out with the next trick. I am still a little, what is the word.... Trying to digest this.
Did not many of us say 2 top championships alongside each other will not work long term.
OK, first of all I only have found it on German web site www.rallye-magazin.de, nowheere else. Second I checked the date, its not April Fouls day. If this story is truue, as it is sinking in, I tend to feel sorry for every bad word I may ever have said about Max Mosley and congratulate him wholeheartedly on this one!
httpbabelfish.yahoo.comtranslate_urldoitdonetturlintl1frbf-hometrurlhttp3A2F2Fwww.rallye-magazin.de2Ftop2Ftopnews2Fd162Fd2F20092F042F042Fmosley-weg-von-hersteller-wm2Findex.htmllpde_enbtnTrUrlTranslate
Translation Notes.
- Rallye WM is German for WRC.
- The last chapter "Accordingly the FIA president gives itself also little anxiously around the possible exit of a further manufacturer", well the original says he does not care at all if another manufacturer leaves, quite different the translation!
- "without restrictions of number of revolutions", the original simply talks of without rev limiter!
For a moment I wondered how rallying without a rev limiter will save money for privateers in PWRC, but then I put my FIA glasses on and understood we safe the money for a rev limiter and if we do 16 rounds we save 16 times the money for a rev limiter! As a by-product this would make the stupid souprally rules obsolete as no engine would survive the first day....
OK, but I wanted to stop sarcasm.
No really, read through this article carefully and it is absolutely stunningly great news! Very, very, very well done, Max and FIA. Not sure if ISC likes this.
Well, think about it! If we cancel the manufacturer WRC and turn the whole WRC a series for amateurs, this makes the way free for the IRC to give us a real world championship!
Yippiiieee!!!!!
|
 Re: FIA succeeds? No more 2 top rally championship by Chris B
|
7-Apr-09 05:29 AM |
OK, thanks for the original text. Doesn’t sound half as bad as the German translation by rallye-magazin.de. However I can see how you interpred the original text that Max wants an off season WRC for amateurs, which would certainly be the end of it.
Basically, if Mosley’s idea is to not let the manufacturer teams dictate the rules but make a championship that caters for both, amateurs and manufacturers in the same way, than I am 100 percent with him!
This is what we have in IRC and this is what we had i.e. in 19801981, David Sutton flying the Ford colours and the Talbot works team being nothing more but a small Peugeot importer, against full Fiat Abarth and Audi works teams. In regards to bringbackrealrallying’s comment the team bosses are ex-drivers that love rallying, truue but as well Malcolm Wilson is a business man who must think of the profit of his comany. So he is probably all for expensive M2 cars that can’t beat his own works cars and are driven by Millionaires rather than talents.
But we should not forget who pays for this show. The manufacturers! Max Mosley is confusing in the original text as when he talks “makes” rather than “manufacturers”, with makes he means teams like Munchies. But rallying is still called “motorsport”, not “icecreamsport”. Equal chances, yes, but I always found the makes WRC more important than the drivers one, and I mean car makes, not icecream! The public must find it very weird that Munchies is fighting Ford! Also Malcolm can not engineer and homologate a state of the art WRCar if Ford doesn’t support this. Without manufacturers there will be no professional WRC! And they pay to get something in return! So what we need is a show that is interesting to the manufacturers and interesting to the customers of the manufacturers they want to sell their product to – the fans and TV audience! Keep this in mind in my following lines, wherre I don’t understand the stance of the FIA or Mr. Mosley
The press conference talk.
So if the FIA doesn’t care about manufacturers and wants to give equal chances to the amateurs, taking tennis racquets as example. Good point. Maybe me as well as that rallye-magazine.de site originally misunderstood him because it is such a contradiction to how the FIA currently runs the WRC. Maybe indeed learned a mistake.
Because exactly as Ron explained already, who was it, IRC or WRC, who invented 2-car teams, minimum number of starts for everyone and a rule actually not allowing M2 or B teams to run the latest spec cars!
I tend to disagree with Mosley’s quote “There has been a tendency in the last years to run the World Rally Championship for manufacturers”
If this was the case, why have Peugeot, Mitsubishi Skoda all left in one go, now Subaru** and Suzuki and Volkswagen and Renault have cancelled their intention to join Why have Seat, Toyota, all left It’s not that long ago that we had 6-7 manufacturers.
Subaru perfect example before you come up with economic crisis. When Peugeot UK joined IRC they said they decided so specifically because in this climate they need clever and efficient marketing. Subaru as a niche manufaturer used rallying successfully as a mythos for their brand. I believe bad championship management and maybe to a lesser degree their lack of results contributed to quitting, but certainly not the economic crisis, in which they need to profile themselves more than ever before! And that Peugeot, Skoda and Mitsubishi left for ill management and u-turns we know. If the crisis was the only reason why manufacturers leave the WRC, then how you explain they are queueing to join the IRC!
On so many other points he is losing me.
To fight the economic crisis we do S2000 2011 and 1600 Turbo 2013. –no, S2000 is not 2010, because then WRCars are still allowed parallel, who wants to fight them with an S2000 must be Don Quixote!- My question, how does this safe money having to develop a new concept of car every 2 years.
I have been so happy at the prospect of 1600cc turbo. Now in this press conference Max Mosley clearly talks of the 1600 Turbo as a custom engine! Now that is the only thing I can imagine being worse than S2000! I have just said, don’t let manufacturers dictate the rules, but remember we need them and we have to offer them a show they find useful. Can you seriously imagine Citroen, Ford or Subaru running a WRC program using and such in case of success promoting a, say, Volkswagen engine!
In measures custom equipment has definite merits, but to that extent it is taking the whole point of any manufacturer to creaate a rally car –and even for amateur teams we still need rally cars- to zero. Even Mosley, saying we don’t need manufacturers, he talks in length of engineering the road cars profit . How, if private teams are supposed to engineer and homologate their own expensive rally cars, using custom base material a foreign manufacturer. With custom engine we might as well use a custom shell, paint one red, one blue and one green and have a Citroen Focus battling a Subaru Focus and a Skoda Focus. This is pointless for the manufacturers and boring for anyone watching it!
MM
„Other examples are the recovery of energy exhausts....”
He He has just decided against turbos!!!!
“Whatever we do has to fit with the future product range of the manufacturers. It’s no good doing something outside of that.”
Err, dito! Again he contradicts everything he just said. For this reason we need 1600cc turbo now, and no S2000 and no custom engine!
On winter season In motorsport you are hard pushed to find two motorsport disciplines that are more different in marketing aspects and the fan base they attract. Maybe touring cars or F2 or A1GP should be moved to the winter. Well, basically
- As long as WRC and F1 do not run on the same weekend, which should be easy enough, I do not believe one is taking fans and media attention away the other. In contrary RTL even moves their WRC reports to F1 weekends only.
- It also is not going to help the WRC in general sport attention to find a new fan base. A winter season has the WRC more in line with soccer and skiing!
- I also don’t think it brings more weight to the World Champion title. If the 2011 World Champ is announced in April, I don’t take this title serious as the year has just started, if in return I call him the 201011 World Champ, it confuses me!
The winter season will be a big mistake!
Max Mosley on rotation “there are probably 20, likely in the future to be 22-24 or even more events that really should be in the World Championship because of the quality of the organisation or the location in the part of the world they take place, or a combination of those two things.” Further down he also mentions commercial sense and population of the locations.
All good points, but I could name immediately 10 current events on which neither of this applies! How, for the sake of World Rallying, does this justify sacrificing Monte and Safari for Cyprus, Jordan, Bulgaria, etc., even if just for odd seasons. Besides wheere do these 24 rounds all the sudden come , for the first time in 35 years of WRC history.
Main topic
MM This is a hot topic. There has been a tendency in the last years to run the World Rally Championship for manufacturers when they have been the minority. We increasingly think – not just in the WRC, but in the Cross-Country World Cup, which has huge amateur contingents – instead of running for manufacturers and letting the amateurs do the best they can, we ought, perhaps, to run the Championship for the amateurs and let the manufacturers come on those terms. Then it’s a more natural situation for the drivers, in any event the best drivers would go to manufacturer cars. We ought to try and make sure the manufacturer cars are not superior, other than perhaps marginally, to those run by the amateurs. For example, in tennis, you do not give Nadal or Federer a special racquet. They all play with the same racquet, although this is never achievable in something as complex as motorsport. That’s a bit philosophical. The basic idea is running these Championships for the amateurs and letting the manufacturers come if it suits them, that’s very much the way we are beginning to think.
And
Q David Evans, Autosport, UK
What about next year We face the possibility of having no manufacturers next year.
MM If there are no manufacturers, in the sense of entering the Manufacturers’ Championship, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, what does matter is the number of makes and we are certainly going to have a number of different makes entering the Championship next year and that’s the fundamental thing.
I left these large bits of MM talk uncommented. Maybe rallye-magazin.de was –not for the first time- translating wrong or over the top. At least they used a wake up headline indicating there would be no manufacturers WRC any more. MM relativates some points during the conference. But essentially what he is saying here in these last paragraphs shown the press conference is that he indeed could picture a WRC
- without manufacturers, aka for amateurs
- in the off season.
I do seriously believe if this happens, even Joe Public will start taking the IRC more serious, rallies like Monte will want to stay in IRC and the manufacturers will want to go there.
So my original point stands. I can actually see a big positive in all that – being that the chances open ever more for the IRC becoming the one and only truue World Championship of our beloved sport!
|
Citroen
Fiat
Ford
Mitsubishi
Peugeot
Skoda
Subaru