Speaking of whom, who do you think won't have a seat next year, bearing in mind the latter three are almost certainly bringing a large purse.Any new manufacturer looking to enter would have the pick of drivers; Meeke, Latvala, Mikkelsen, Breen and now Lappi.
But there is nobody looking to enter
I'd agree, once they dropped to 1600cc it lost a lot of it's charm.Some might scoff but I reckon WRC lost its appear when it dropped homologation rules and moved to WRC spec. Back then manufacturers had to make so many examples (800? 2000? can't remember) of a certain car matching closely to what they intended to compete in. It's for this reason cars like the Lancia 037 or the Lancer Evo could be bought.
After WRC spec came in, there was no requirement for this, hence why we don't have 350bhp 4wd Yarises (Yarai?) or Fiestas now. Getting back to my point, if you saw an Impreza Turbo/STI, Evo or Integrale years ago you immediately recognised it as something similar to the competition variants in the WRC. There's nothing like that now. Even if someone did recognise a Fiesta ST over its pensioner base-spec equivalent, they aren't going to think "Didn't Ogier use to drive one of those?".
TLR - WRC the sport is less visible because homogolation died.
Same. I was perhaps a bit young for the Group B and early Group A stuff. I got into it with the likes of Celicas, Imprezas, Lancers and Escorts floating about. Tie-in stuff like the McRae games helped but it was seeing an Evo 6 for the first time on the roads (for example) that really endeared me to the sport.But that's the era I knew, so maybe I'm less accommodating to change lol
There's obviously something very wrong with the sport...
I'm not saying it's less exciting. It's just there's now a bit of a disconnect with the sport that was once there. To paraphrase the US saying "Win on sunday, sell on monday" doesn't seem to be as important as it once was and the manufacturers know this.
So where are all the manufacturers then if everything is tickety-boo? They should all be queuing up surely?