WRC, now the 2025 rules are starting to get scary. But to the present Houses. The three teams that are competing for victories, podiums and titles have let the FIA know that they are concerned about the new rules ratified a few weeks ago and which, starting from 2025, will significantly change the current Rally1.
According to various sources from Motorsport.com, Toyota Gazoo Racing, Hyundai Motorsport and M-Sport Ford have written a joint letter to the Federation expressing their need to keep the Rally1 cars with which they are racing this year in the World Championship unchanged.
The current regulation has recently been revised with the specific intention of creating less expensive cars from an economic point of view, setting aside hybrid propulsion (the electric package created and supplied by Compact Dynamics will be completely removed), accompanying this decision with a further reduction of aerodynamics, with the concomitant introduction of a package to make the Rally2 cars more performing, bringing them closer to the reference cars in terms of performance.
Over the last few weeks, several drivers had expressed their dissent for a change that was as radical as it was considered useless for the purposes of a more entertaining and attractive WRC for other manufacturers, but also for enthusiasts and spectators.
Not only that, because the team designers have made it known that they are not at all happy with the little time available to redesign the cars, carry out the necessary tests and homologate them in time for next season.
The team that was most vocal in this regard was Hyundai Motorsport, with team principal Cyril Abiteboul stating the impossibility of doing a good job in preparing a new car for 2025. “We expressed our opinion in December , in January and February. We did it verbally and in writing.”
“At a certain point you simply have to deal with the situation and accept that the governing body does its own thing. The only thing we need to understand is the consequences from a competitiveness point of view. Hyundai is very involved in rallying, we want to be a serious competitor and we want to do what is necessary to have a competitive car compared to our competitors.”
“We achieved good results in the opening races of this season. I think we all agree that there were some favorable circumstances, even though Neuville was impressive in Monte-Carlo. We know we still have a clear handicap against of Toyota and now we are faced with a situation where this handicap must remain for another 2 years.”
Jari-Matti Latvala, team principal of Toyota Gazoo Racing, expressed his opinion to Motorsport.com: “Ideally eliminating the hybrid will make the cars slower. At the same time changing the restrictors and the aerodynamics in one go It's a bit much, because it means you have to start optimizing the engine's performance for the different restrictors and doing aerodynamic tests.” Furthermore, Toyota has already started doing them this weekend during pre-event testing for the Croatian Rally.
I hope we can find a solution that allows us not to immediately do all these things next year. For me it would have been enough to remove the hybrid to avoid the teams having to do so many tests. We have limited days dedicated to testing, but nowadays we can do simulations and we try to optimize everything possible.”
“We started communicating with the FIA and now there are weekly meetings, which is really good. All the manufacturers agree (to maintain the current regulations) so I think our chances of finding a compromise are really good.”
The opinion of Richard Millener, team principal of M-Sport Ford, could not be missed: “The timeframe will be quite tight to have new aerodynamic rules for next year. The teams will want to try the new solutions, develop them and understand them. There are many things to do in just 10 months and, realistically, it will take 6 months to sort things out and understand what the reduction in aerodynamics means and develop, build, create components and test them.”
“Some of these things require quite high levels of approval and this, for the manufacturers, will be a real challenge,” concluded the British team principal.
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