Made for Television

After the disappointingly soporific opener to the F1 World Championship at Bahrain last weekend, there has been a lot of talk about what can or should be done to improve the show. And when people talk about the show, what they really mean is the television show. In the flesh, the sight and sound of F1 cars have such a dramatic impact that it doesn't really matter than the racing is processional and the result not in any doubt.

While F1 might be utterly reliant on TV viewing figures to maintain its income stream, the rules are not ultimately written by the sport's promoter, and FOM is not a television company. There are, however, two major world championships which are run by a television company. Both the Intercontinental Rally Challenge and the World Touring Car Championship are run by satellite television broadcaster Eurosport. But does being run by a television company actually improve the quality of the show?

Watching the opening round of the IRC at Monte Carlo at the beginning of the year, I have to say that the answer is, at the very least, a qualified positive. Eurosport, being a specialist sports channel (and a minority interest sports channel at that) can justify broadcasting rally stages live, and this gives much more of a real sense of what rallying is about than the edited highlights packages for the WRC which ITV and Dave have put out over the last few years (I don't have Motors TV, so I don't know if they are doing any better a job of the WRC coverage).

By contrast, their coverage of the latest round in Argentina last weekend was rather more pedestrian. I suppose it is inevitable that, while it may be possible to justify broadcasting the Monte Carlo rally in full, there is rather less appetite for watching an ordinary, common or garden gravel round of the IRC. And to be fair, I was at something of a loose end last weekend, and even then, I doubt I'd have sat through it if they had. Unfortunately, their coverage of the event wasn't even as good as what North One Television used to manage with the WRC. Yes, there were a few brief, quite watchable 'in car' clips, but there was no real attempt to tell the story of the rally. And, while I can perhaps sympathise with the difficulty of commentating from a small room somewhere in London on pre-edited TV footage beamed from the other side of the world, I simply cannot warm to Carlton Kirby. Can't help thinking (quite probably wrongly) that I could hardly do a worse job myself.

It's a shame, because the Argentinian rally, like the Brazilian event which preceded it, looked to have some really fantastic rally stages. It is not only the Monte Carlo rally which leaves me wondering quite how the IRC have pulled off the coup of stealing some of the best rallies from under the WRC's nose, while the premier series goes to such uninspired sounding locations as Jordan, Turkey and Bulgaria (it is of course entirely possible that the Bulgarian Rally will prove to be a classic - I know absolutely nothing about the place as a motorsporting country, though I can't believe there's a huge rallying fanbase waiting eagerly for the event).

What Eurosport and partners KSO have achieved with the IRC, though, is to create a second-tier rally series that has manufacturer support, and which, while it may lack absolute stars, has rather more depth of talent than, say, the old European Rally Championship used to have. In Juho Hanninen and Kris Meeke, winners of the last two rallies, it has two drivers who, if there was any justice, would be in the WRC by now. And it's just possible that, with three different winners from the first three rallies (even if one was a guest-appearance from WRC star Mikko Hirvonen) that will exceed the total for the WRC for the whole season, if as last year, it turns out once more to be a straight fight between Hirvonen and Loeb with nobody else getting so much as a look in. And if Guy Wilks or Jan Kopecky get their act together in their Skodas, or if Stephane Sarrazin or Nicolas Vouilloz reappear for the later European tarmac rounds, there could be more winners.

Certainly, there were far more serious contenders for victory in the field for the opening round of the IRC than there have been in the WRC for many years. A rule-set which allows a well-run privateer with an off-the-shelf car

It's a shame really that Ford aren't running a squad of Fiesta S2000s, and that Fiat abandoned their programme with the Punto Abarth after last year's lacklustre showing with Giandomenico Basso and Anton Alen, because it leaves the IRC with just two serious manufacturer outfits, which is the same problem which has afflicted the WRC in recent years.

Nonetheless, if KSO/Eurosport are really interested in creating a rally series which captures the imagination of television viewers, I can't help but think they've missed a trick. Why not insist on rear wheel drive cars? Inherently much more spectacular to watch than 4WD cars, think back to the early days of the old Group A formula when there were so few 4WD rally cars that a number of rear wheel drive cars were campaigned with some success on the world stage. To my mind, a BMW M3 or Sierra Cosworth rally car was inherently much more exciting to watch than a Lancia Delta or a Mazda 323. Why not do it again? Yes, Skoda, Peugeot and Ford do not market rear wheel drive 207s, Fabias and Fiestas, but chances are, you'd have difficulty getting your local car dealer to supply you with a 4 wheel drive one too. Yes, 4WD is inherently faster than rear wheel drive, but then an unrestricted 3.5 litre turbo rally car is inherently faster than a 2 litre turbo. Doesn't mean that you're allowed to run one in the IRC, or anywhere else in international rallying, for that matter. And besides, if Sebastien Loeb is perhaps getting a little bored of winning everything in sight in the World Rally Championship, the chance to show what he can do in a 280BHP rear wheel drive rally car just might be the thing to persuade him to hang around a while longer...

The Future of Rallying?

The Monte Carlo Rally was won by the reigning champion, a French guy called Sebastien. No surprise there, then. The winner, though, was not Mr Loeb, but Junior World Rally champion, Sebastien Ogier. The World Rally Championship seems peculiarly intent on committing hara-kiri and the latest nail in the coffin has been the series organisers' decision to adopt an events rotation system which this year sees the Monte Carlo Rally, the single most famous rally in the sport, ditched from the championship.

Rather than 'rest' the event for a year, or run it as a non-championship event, the Automobile Club de Monaco turned to the Eurosport-backed Intercontinental Rally Challenge, who probably couldn't believe their luck. For all that the WRC has been in a pretty dire state over the last 3 years or so, with rarely more than 3 potential winners in the field and no serious rival to Sebastien Loeb emerging for the world title (only a serious run of bad fortune for the Frenchman kept Hirvonen in the running as long as he was last year, and for all that Marcus Gronholm sometimes ran Loeb reasonably close on occasion, I never really had the sense that he was going to beat him over a season), the IRC has had a relatively low profile in the first years of its existence. It's a fact perhaps explained by the relative obscurity of the front-running competitors. Reigning champion Nicolas Vouilloz is probably still better known as a ten time downhill mountain bike champion than as a champion rally driver. His major rivals, Giandomenico Basso and Anton Alen are hardly household names either, even among racing fans.

With the Monte, though, the IRC got more publicity in one week than it had had in the whole of its history to date. It even got a four page spread in the Observer sports section, not normally noted for its in-depth coverage of rallying. Eurosport rose to the occasion, putting together what has got to be some of the best TV coverage rallying has ever known (much of which is available to watch on their website). Their live coverage of SS5, St Bonnet Le Froid which wound through nearly 25kms of picturesque, snow-covered Alpine countryside, much of it shown from the in-car camera of Jan Kopecky's Skoda Fabia, gave a real impression of what is actually involved in pushing a rally car to the limit for mile after mile in icy conditions with sheer drops off to the side. It's something which years of North One coverage of the WRC has never really captured and made quite an impact on me.

There was much talk of how the Monte has returned to its roots this year, having been homogenised by the FIA's demands that the event fit its standard WRC event template. This was, to my mind, about half true. The night stages at Col De Turini made a welcome return, and the event was spread over a geographically wider area, but the overall stage mileage was actually even lower than was the case previously and the trend for repeating morning stages in the afternoon remains. In other words, the Monte still retains many of the vices of modern rallying.

Perhaps the greatest novelty for anyone only used to following the WRC in recent years was the lack of certainty about who would be righting it out for victory. Nicolas Vouilloz seemed a good bet, but, thanks to a combination of the lack of competitive drives in the WRC just now, and the fact that, well, it's the Monte meant that he had plenty of opposition. Last year's runner-up Basso was back in an Abarth Grande Punto, and he was joined by Anton Alen and Suzuki WRC refugee Toni Gardemeister, in a privately run Fiat. The new works Skodas turned out to be very quick, and Juho Hanninen led much of the event, while Jan Kopecky ran quickly when he wasn't struggling with new-car gremlins. There were also a brace of good serious runners fighting to knock Vouilloz off his perch as the top Peugeot driver. Former Mitsubishi and Hyundai WRC driver Freddy Loix was entered in a Peugeot-Belgium machine, while Ulsterman Kris Meeke, a former JWRC front-runner whose career has suffered lately for the lack of works drives at the very top level, won stages in his Peugeot-UK backed car. Former Subaru tarmac specialist, former F1 driver Stephane Sarrazin was also very much in the running early on.

In the end, looking at the results, one might conclude that Sebastien Ogier had it easy. He won by nearly two minutes from Loix and Sarrazin, with only five drivers within 10 minutes of his winning time. The reality, though, was that Ogier was lucky that his major opponents hit trouble. Both Meeke and Hanninen had looked like they might challenge for victory before they crashed out, and Kopecky and Sarrazzin might have put up more of a fight had they not had niggling car troubles or got their tyre choices wrong.

So is the IRC the answer for rally fans frustrated with the state of the World Rally Championship and looking for something more interesting to follow? Well, yes and no. The S2000 cars are much cheaper to run than their WRC counterparts, cheap enough to be a viable option for national dealer-teams to run competitively against the works efforts of Skoda and Abarth (indeed, Peugeot, whose 207 is probably the best car in the series at the moment, doesn't actually have a works team in the series right now, providing customer cars to dealer-backed entries, and support through the satellite Kronos team which ran Loeb to the 2006 title in a semi-privately entered Citroen Xsara.

Sadly, though, having followed the Monte, it is striking that the S2000 cars are not nearly as spectacular in motion as the WRC machines. They might have nearly the same horsepower as WRC cars, but it's all at the top end of the rev range, and they have only a small fraction of the torque. They certainly don't explode out of the corners in the way that late-period WRC cars do. One can see why Sebastien Loeb was horrified by the fact that the WRC will itself be reverting to S2000 cars from 2010 (albeit they will be turbocharged, and will thus have more grunt). I can't help thinking that one change which, over the long run, would cost nothing, would be to make the cars rear wheel drive. There's no real reason while rally cars should be four wheel drive. If its allowed by the regulations then, of course, cars will be 4WD but anyone who has ever seen a Mark 2 Escort rally car, or for that matter, one of the original Sierra Cosworths, will know that rear wheel drive machines are much better to watch.

On the events front, the IRC has done rather well. As well as the Monte, the IRC has taken over the Safari Rally, the African classic so foolishly tossed aside by the WRC. The San Remo Rally is on the calendar, as is the old ERC classic, the Ypres Rally in Belgium. Add to that a new Brazilian event based around Curitiba and the Rally Russia, and it is clear that the event really does live up to its 'Intercontinental' tag. And there's nothing on their calendar so monumentally pointless as the Rally Jordan either... The old European Rally Championship is perhaps what the IRC most closely resembles, not least in that it is much more asphalt-based that the WRC, with a 50/50 split between tarmac and gravel. This will doubtless help the Italian and French drivers against the Finns, though I've always felt rallying really ought to involve mud and trees. One rally that certainly will involve mud, and probably an awful lot of rain, is the Rally Scotland, which will round off the championship in November. I know I'm biased, living in Edinburgh myself, but I still think that Scotland has stages which are more than a match for anything that Wales can give us, and this is one event that I fully intend to see.

The WRC kicks off this weekend in Ireland, and while the Rally Ireland features some great roads, it hardly ranks alongside the Monte Carlo in the popular consciousness. The cars will be much more spectacular than the S2000 machines in the IRC, but I seriously doubt anyone other than Loeb and, perhaps, Hirvonen stand any chance of winning in the WRC on tarmac unless something really unexpected happens. When I first heard that the WRC was moving over to S2000 cars from 2010 I was disappointed, but on the strength of last weekend, it might just be exactly what the sport needs.