The next plenary meeting of the FIA ​​will be held on October 12th, where the next events of the WRC will be discussed among the others.

The Promoter WRC in the person of Oliver Ciesla want to start being able to modify “the structure of events”. The motivation is directed to savings, because there is the will to raise the number of rounds in the future calendar. That will be dictated from year to year, at the moment we have 14 rounds but already we are looking at the entry of Chile and Japan and we will have to try to make room by leaving out a European event.

In 2020, then, other events could be entered, one in all, the Safari Rally in Kenya, so that the total could increase immediately to 16-17 events. Therefore the proposal to systematically increase events up to 20-22 rallies will be accompanied by a program of round loss and reducing the structural cost.

Some of the adjustments that will be made will focus in particular on the human group that accompanies the WRC, reducing the mechanics authorized to work on the cars during the services, going from 12 to 9 in the case of Team with three cars and from 8 to 6 in the case of structures with only two vehicles.

As for the private test days pre event, it is expected that will be reduced from the current 55 to 42, which will give a small break to the drivers who already spend more than 200 days away from home.

Perhaps one of the most delicate requests that go hand in hand with the proposal would be to want to reduce the total number of competitive kilometers that a World Rally Championship event can have.

Currently this figure is in 500 kilometers of special test, but that no one has ever implemented more than always relying little above the minimum. It seems that the new proposal should be reduced to establish a new roof of 350 km for timed stages, keeping the minimum in 300 km.

In objective terms, virtually none of the WRC events exceed 350 km of timed sections, the most outstanding was the Monte-Carlo Rally, which reached 388 km in this year’s edition, but already this year it will be reduced to around 320 km.

However, this will have an important impact when it comes to giving the organizers some freedom when designing their itineraries. As for reliability, in particular will want to be able to control the retirement, before completing a test that will allow you to be able to mount a new engine for the next event. This was the case for Seb Ogier during his withdrawal for mechanical reasons in the past Rally of Portugal, when he turned to the last stretch to the assistance park for the pre-podium assistance.

The Portuguese race has also set a precedent compared to the minimum tires with which a driver can start with. Now they will have to have all four wheels healthy and attached to the vehicle. Because as we said at the time, the FIA ​​did not like the image of seeing Kris Meeke making the super special of Porto with a tire that launched sparks.

This one could get interesting.

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The RacerViews info

By Carlo Canova (Carlocanovarallye) September 2018

Originally in Italian. Editing by Sam Tickell

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