Can WRC Rally Be Saved?
Written by Peter Berger · November 29, 2004
Around Thanksgiving, in my house, the pheromones that men emit while bonding flow thickly and freely. In the haze of their L-tryptophan enhanced post-prandial stupors, men move slowly, so as not to alarm their pack-mates. Belts are loosened. Talk of politics is avoided. Attention focuses, inevitably, on whatever sport is on TV. Often, this ends up being football, naturally, but every so often I’ll walk into the room only to find all eyes focused in rapt attention on a golf match.
I have great respect for the skill required to be a competitive golfer. It is a subtle game. It requires more stamina and strength than you’d think, if you’ve never tried it. Put on a replay of an amazing putt and I’ll be able to appreciate it, as long as I don’t have to watch for more than about 30 seconds or so. But I can’t understand the point of watching an entire golf match, or even a hole. As a spectator sport, it is composed entirely of interstitial pauses. Watching golf because you “like sports” is like listening to John Cage’s 4′33″ because you “like music.” When a golfer is taking a shot, the game is interesting. At all other times, the sport is of merely academic interest.
Realize, then, the pain it causes me to admit that WRC Rally racing, which I love, is the golf of the motorsports world.
Rally is about timing. Drivers compete only indirectly. Each driver and co-driver attacks the course, and the best time wins. Unless something has gone very wrong, there are effectively no passes in rally, except for simulations created by compositing telemetry data after the fact. If you played the most popular rally videogames, you might not even realize this, since they typically offer an “everyone races the same dirt track at once” experience, a race format that would probably lead to molten flaming death in real life. The game manufacturers do this for an obvious reason: to most people, time trials are more boring than wheel to wheel racing.
There is not an obvious solution to this problem; which is mostly one of presentation and immanence. The networks — for both golf and rally — are increasingly moving towards highlight reels. Take all the action from a single day and compress it into ten minutes, or an hour. Viewed this way, both sports are marvelously dense with thrills and cliffhanger moments.
And yet, as a viewer, this treatment leaves me cold. A highlight reel is not a sporting event. Sports, like news, or a good chilli, is best served hot. As a spectator, I can’t even stand watching a sporting event more than a few minutes lagged on my Tivo. Once the Steeler game is over, I could care less about seeing what happened. I want to watch in the moment. I want to be in the moment.
A few years ago, Speed Channel would broadcast a compressed highlight reel each night after the day’s rallying. Last year, they moved to showing a single three-hour show on the day after the rally finished. This year, they are showing a one-hour highlight reel a full week after the rally ended. For that entire week, I creep around the Internet like a cat burgler, hands ready over my eyes, lest I find out that Petter Solberg and Subaru won in Wales, and therefore I won’t want to bother watching the highlight reel. Most Americans have no idea what WRC Rally is. Speed Channel isn’t helping; viewership is down.
Combine this with the fact that WRC Rally is a monstrously expensive sport, and you have a sport in freefall. Citroën and Peugeot — the only two teams to have won the manufacturers title in the past five years — have both announced that they are leaving the sport at the end of 2005. When even the team that is winning the championship is fleeing, how do you make a compelling case to other manufacturers that this is a value proposition they want to be a part of?
WRC Rally is not going to disappear tomorrow, any more than F1 will. But if something isn’t done to improve the ratio between the expenses of running races where it’s more or less expected that half the drivers will drive their cars off a cliff and into a tree, and the returns for participating in the sport, then the participating talent pool will continue to shrink. Colin McRae has already decided that the Paris-Dakar Rally is more worth his time than WRC. Who will be next?
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126 Responses to “Can WRC Rally Be Saved?”
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You bring up a lot of great points Peter. As someone who participates in Rally in the USA (http://www.katinger.com/2004/08/maine-forest-rally.php ) I was particularly saddened by the SCCA killing Pro and Club rally from 2005 on (http://www.drivingsports.com/a/templates/topic.aspx?articleid=43&zoneid=1 ). They did this for “liability reasons,” but perhaps that’s part of the problem too. My fellow competitors and I have been racking our brains to try and figure out how to work with the new sanctioning bodies for Rally in the US (NASA and Rally America) to make the “show” more entertaining for fans.
While I agree with you that sports are best served “hot” and not in a highlight reel, there are parts of rally races that even I don’t care to see…for example sitting in my car waiting and waiting to start a stage. No fun, but a necessary evil. This is the same challenge that drag racing faces. There is just no way you could get someone to watch an entire day of drag racing because there is too much time between rounds and between runs. The NHRA has made strides in reducing time between rounds and making strong penalties to avoid time wasting oil downs, but the fact of the matter is you’ll never be able to safely get things going quickly enough for a live telecast that is entertaining.
I think this is where the web comes in, however the cost of the technology is still a bit high and unreliable. For example; I would like to be able to log onto the WRC web site at any time during the LIVE rally and be able to get in-car cams and telemetry on any car. Live timing and scoring is neat, but for real rally freaks it’s about the DRIVING. I want to know how far down the gas pedal is on certain points in a stage. I want to know what the G-load was when Solberg crashed into a tree. I want to know the tire temps on the tarmac stages. I could go on and on, but my point is that in order to deliver this info it would be very expensive for the sanctioning body, and also probably unfavorable for the competitors. But hey, if it could help increase interest maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
I know that somewhere, somehow there is a way to bring the “average” fan closer to the excitement and raw grit and power that is rally racing…but I just hope it does come too late. Some may scoff at your concerns Peter and say that WRC doesn’t need “saving”…but just ask the SCCA the same question!
I disagree with several of your points but those are all very subjective so I am not going to get into them. Except I must say rallying is still 100times more exciting than golf, fishing and other “sports” we are being fed by TV lately . But, I’d like to point out couple of errors in your article. I agree with you on Speed reducing their coverage but their program was still an hour and half with another 30min rally magazine preceding it, so total of 2 hours. Also the broadcast wasn’t a week later but the same Sunday when the rally finished. I think overall if it can stay that way that’s not bad, I am afraid it might get worse. Don’t get me wrong I still would prefer maybe 30 to 60min on each rally day but if you want to follow the stage by stage results you have the internet.
Great site! Does anyone know where I can find live webcams on the Internet to watch amateur racing?
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