Two day, four day, and multi-location rallies on the horizon

The President of the World Rally Championship Commission Morrie Chandler says he wants to give more organisational freedom to rallies in the new 12 round WRC calendar.

In an exclusive interview for wrc.com, Chandler said as long as WRC rallies satisfied a basic set of criteria, and kept the same competitive distance, he had no objections to them running over two, three or even four days. Chandler also said he wanted to relax regulations concerning central service parks, so organisers could choose the geographical reach of their events.

From 2009 a new two year rotational WRC calendar will be introduced, featuring 12 rallies each year - down from the current total of 15. From next year onwards the WRC will comprise 24 rallies, each run once every two years.

“From 2009 WRC rallies won’t necessarily run for three days,” said Chandler. “We had a four day Monte Carlo Rally this year for reasons which suited its promotion and personally I don’t have a big problem with that. As long as there’s plenty of notice and it works, it’s not as issue. I know one event that says it can run quite successfully in two days. If that’s possible - if it gives them the promotion they’re looking for and gives us the competitive distance and the WRC exposure - then I don’t see anybody being disadvantaged. If we can give that flexibility to the organisers without dramatically affecting the costs for the teams, then I can’t see many negatives.”

Chandler added that the next generation of WRC cars could enable rallies to consider different servicing options: “The way we’re going technically - the move to reduce the complexity of the cars, make them more reliable and reduce the opportunities for servicing - should lead to greater reliability and give the organisers the opportunity to take their events a little further afield. That’s entirely up to the organiser of the event; some countries love the central service park, it works very well for them, while others find it doesn’t let the event get to different parts of the county and they would like to do things differently.”

Click here to read the first part of Chandler’s interview: Changes ahead for the WRC - Part one