FIA Announces Downsizing Future WRC Events

[409industries]

In order to attract more manufacturer teams into the sport, the FIA has confirmed during today’s World Motor Sport Council meeting that the World Rally Championship season will be downsized beginning in 2009.

http://www.dirtyimpreza.com/images/uploads/article_images/FIA_downsize_1.jpg
Today’s high-tech, prototype-like WRC cars will be phased out in 2012.
Photo: SWRT

The ’09 campaign will feature just 12 events, down from 16 this season. The excessive number of rallies has been given by some automakers, most notoriously Mitsubishi and Skoda, as the justification for the end of their factory-backed involvement in the sport.

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Photo: SWRT

To further reduce costs, the FIA also announced that WRC cars will be focused on the current, production-based Group N and Super 2000 specs beginning in 2012. Today’s cars are entirely purpose-built, sharing no parts with their production counterparts.

[Blix666]

"downsizing" huh?....this sounds bad...

i think the other stuff is bad too, but i don't know what most of it means :lick:

[409industries]

It means that in an effort to get more factory teams to participate they are going to do a couple things.

1) make less stops on the WRC circuit, so more factory teams can afford to do the whole series. Logistically, it must be insane to try and coordinate 16 stops world-wide.

2) make it so that cars dont have to be super expensive to run in the events (production based rally cars, not one-off subaru awesomeness)

[Blix666]

oh...well, maybe it's not so bad after all! :tongue: