The World Rally Championship is ready for you

The World Rally Championship is working on breakthrough gaming technology which would allow rally fans to compete for their own world title on real-time events from the comfort of their own homes.

Chairman of International Sportsworld Communicators - the global promoter of the WRC - Neil Duncanson has confirmed that live gaming is the one of the next major steps in the development of the series.

He said: “Unlike any other major sport, the WRC is absolutely built for live gaming. That’s the ability for you or I to sit at home on our sofas and drive in a rally in real time on a computer.”

ISC is exploring the technology to allow on-line gamers to start the same rally at the same time as the actual competitors in the World Rally Championship. Through ongoing virtual computer developments allied to ISC’s own ground-breaking on-stage mapping technology, the dreams of rally fans across the world will soon be realised. And they could even be recognised at the highest level.

Duncanson adds: “When I explained this plan to [FIA president] Max Mosley, he was very taken with the idea. And he has offered me the opportunity, when we get this up and running, to award a trophy to the winner of the on-line World Rally Championship at the same time that we are handing out the actual silverware to the world champions at the FIA’s awards evening in Monte Carlo.

“This is the next level up. It’s what computer gaming people are looking for. We’ve done computer game simulation and we’ve done simulation XR3i and now they’re all looking for the next step. That step is reality and actually being part of a real event.

You can’t do that in Formula 1, you can’t do that in football, but you can do it in world rally. When Rally Australia starts in couple of weeks, people could be sat at home preparing themselves to start that event - we’re not very far off that. We’ve been talking to some of the major computer game companies and the technology is there to enable us to do it now. It’s just a question of getting what are fairly hefty development costs underwritten by one of these guys and then we’re away.”

You can read an extended interview with Neil Duncanson on wrc.com tomorrow.