I have been a bit worried over the rally sport for quite many year. It is not television friendly at all, and also not very on site spectator friendly. It is also a very dangerous sport, both for spectators and drivers/co drivers. There is exist a "rally cross" discipline where they drive rally cars on tracks, all together, but those tracks are very short and the heats are also short, so they are not so interesting toi watch IMO.

But what if they drove on a track similar to Silverstone but with gravel? 2 minutes laptimes, all start at the same time as F1. Would give us sideways action, passes... All in a TV friendly format. I can imagine such tracks being very popular track day sites also.

Could this be an interesting format for some of the WRC events?

It'll be anything but rally. BTW they are doing such special events on closed tracks as a part of some of the rally events.

This is pretty much the original Race of Champions format, albeit the track wasn't the length of Silverstone.

Actually, they could do it on Silverstone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21_JCx3_vlc

the irony is rallycross was a made for TV format, but its now barely covered

in america theres super late model oval racing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOvqYuMX6WQ

theres the baja style events in america http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKAF3c8kBQ

and there was CORR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjR2iu2Nea8 that championship closed down because of the economy tanking

the daddy is dakar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEVF13twMn0

but mostly we dont care about dirt.

Speedway's quite popular in Britain, to say nothing of Scandinavia and Poland. IMO rallying lost its reason to love when roads became so crowded that it became uneconomical and unsafe to run long stages at racing speed. Now it's sort of a glorified and less-interesting version of TT racing. Mixed maybe with a bit of Enduro. But there's no reason why rallying can't take place on closed circuits, now that the idea of an 'open' circuit is a bit of a misnomer.

How about a combined rally and rallycross championship? If they threw in a couple of touring car rounds at extremely tight circuits, you'd have one hell of a championship. Different turbo boost levels for different disciplines, and you'd be away.

Isn't the basic idea for rallying a race against the clock? A display of car control on different surfaces? Rally isn't about overtaking. There's plenty of classes doing just what you describe above, going from dirt racing to basically all touring cars classes. Put rally drivers on a tarmac course and you have a touring car race, put rally drivers on a dirt track and you have... dirt racing.

Having to depend on a co-driver reading pace notes is part of the rally challenge. What you describe is a different sport, comparable to transferring F1 to closed stages where they have to drive one-by-one to see who covers a roadsection quickest.

Maybe. But it's definitely a sport I would like to see

http://www.torcseries.com/videos.php says hi2u ;)

I don't agree at all that rallying is not tv friendly. The problem is that production company after production company acquire the rights and they really are utterly clueless when it comes to output.

They keep making the same mistakes and having highlights show hours after the end of each days activities, or sometimes you just get something very late on Sunday evening to cover the whole of the weekend. Who wants to wait until 11pm on Sunday to find out what happened on Friday afternoon? There's one thing I think is abundantly clear and that is that rally on tv will simply never be live, yes? That is a format that wouldn't work. You wouldn't have an audience sitting all day watching it, that's for starters. People would dip in and out so there's no point to doing that. Rally on the internet was rammed down out throats as a concept and that's never taken off either has it? Put simply, people still like to watch the very large tv they paid a lot of money for. Let's get over that then.

Given the number of tv stations available on cable/satellite there really are a lot of channels available showing utter shit between 6pm and 9pm on Fri/Sat/Sun nights and that's the timeslot in which a daily show (every day of a rally) should be broadcast. I'm not suggesting the full three hours is needed, but at least an hour would do. It doesn't need much more than:

* 2 - 3 minutes to bring you up to speed on news leading up to the rally
* 2 - 3 minutes to give a quick guide to the course
* 20 - 30 mins of action, concentrating mostly on the main players, but also showing where the little guys ended up. Within this time also show quick snippets of interviews when the main drivers reach the end of each stage. This would let us get to know the drivers a little while hearing their views on the stage, without needing F1 style lifestyle interviews pre-event (I don't think the average rally fan cares that much)
* 3 - 5 mins summary at the end of Fri/Sat

Sunday's show could alter the first couple of mins by showing you a quick minute or two catch-up from the previous day/s.

The remainder of the hour (give or take a few mins with my timings) would of course be taken by ad-breaks.

AND SHOW THE BLOODY THING AT AN HOUR WHEN PEOPLE ARE AWAKE AND WHEN IT'S NOT GOING TO CLASH WITH THE MISSUS' FAVOURITE SHOWS!! I'm sure the average rally fan would happily sit down at 6pm to watch. It's surely preferable to 11pm or not at all, as is usually the case.

Now then....what is so difficult about that?

Be fair on the TV guys; has hatchback racing ever drawn people in? It's the same problem IRL has; the events, the heritage, the depth of field are all fine, but how can you get excited over such uninspiring moving objects?

What, do you have shares in ITV or something?

Of course it's tv's fault, a large amount of it anyway. Where would any sport be without tv? Rally seemed to do fine in the UK when McRae and Burns were around.

Perhaps therein lies the problem, in this country anyway... Talking about things that are uninspiring, I'm certainly not inspired by seeing a Frenchman in a French team dominating the sport year after year.

But it's a vicious circle, non? If the right tv packages were in place then the right sponsors (and the bigger bucks) would be in place, the manufacturers/decent teams would be in place, British drivers would get a fair crack at it in good teams, they would start to get news coverage, people start paying attention when they see it on the news or on the tv show, and that's how these things snowball. Indycar is suffering the same problem. The same few drivers win everything, it's all Honda, crap sponsors.

About 20 years BBC Grandstand did a 'Pot Black' style rally, with the top drivers competing on a single stage. I forget what it was called. It had Steve Rider commentating, and the advantage was supposed to be that they could cover the whole stage. That was before in car cameras and TV friendly spectator stages, though.

Wtf?? Are you serious?? I mean, like, the entire Group B era? Or the 90s Subaru Impreza, Mitsubushi Lancer, every wannabe street racers wet dreams?

Maybe these folks don't seem interested.

Sprint Car Racing with right turns too... that would be great to watch.

Obviously Group B was pretty great; even Jeremy Clarkson, who seems to be impressed with nothing besides himself, genuinely loved the rallying of the Group B era. It's difficult not to be stirred by massively powerful Quattros, RS200s, or Lancia Deltas. The Toyota Celicas in the '90s were quite sexy. But when the title of World Rally Champion is decided over a Grand Prix distance's worth of Special Stages, between a Citroen C4 and a Ford Focus, well. The modern WRC seems just a bad imitation of a successful formula.

Although naturally you have to be suspicious when World Rally is overseen and administered by an organisation dictated and overseen by Mister Formula One, Bernie Ecclestone. He certainly hasn't shied away from 'steering' popular series from competing with F1 for fans and investment in the past.

And those folks look a little too interested.

Ironically, a lot of the damage done to the sport was perpetrated in the name of making it TV friendly. Shorter rallys with often shorter stages, no night stages etc etc.
The thing is, TV makes sense for rally, The cameras can cover much more that you could ever see as a spectator. and with camera getting cheaper and better all the time, a great deal of the action gets filmed to a high quality. Remember when we felt lucky to see shaky amateur VHS of an indecent?

I took a "Special" sort of person to stand all night in a freezing, sleet filled Kilder forest. Just to see (and hear!) Markku Alen's S4 go by at full chat. Worth it though!

Yes, a road course (even on dirt) with wingless sprint cars (especially 410s) would really be something. But unfortunately we won't see it happen...

Pike's Peak?

Paved now, of course.

It would be as close as we could get.

I wish someone would introduce Kimi Raikkonen to sprint cars, as I think they'd be even more up his alley than rallying...

That's what a Super Special stage is! In fact there was a super special track at Silverstone and they even did a mini championship for it.... suffice to say, it didnt last long, there just isnt the interest. Rallying...is Rallying....Racing is Racing.... the sooner people stop trying to fudge the two together, the sooner things get back to the way they were in rallying.

Imp...

Strangely you actually contradict yourself slightly here but not in a bad way.

In days gone by Top Gear Rally report on BBC2 used to do the exact format you are talking about during the RAC/Network Q rally. There would be a highlights show at 7.30pm in the evening and then a repeat later at 11.30pm for those that had actually been out in the stages that day. (So late shows are watched by people that cannot get back in time to see the early show)

They did this on Friday and Saturday, then they did an hour long programme on Sunday afternoon with a complete hour long recap of the whole event Sunday night late.

In short this format was perfect and was watched by millions at one point.

Now...step in ISC to make it all glitzty and to try to make a silk purse from a sows ear....and guess what..they start trying to charge large sums of money for the "uber" production, involving live satellite relay feeds from stages, etc etc etc... Essentially they raised the costs of creating the coverage...and so they passed that on to the TV companies. In short...the amount the rally programmes cost TV companies, they could not get back that value in viewer numbers and thus advertising.

Now...many of the networks, BBC, ITV, Channel Four all have turned their backs on Rallying and now bloody 'Dave' is all that is left and they have been burnt by the idiots now running the WRC.

Give me a production company and I would give you some of the best Rally programming you have ever seen, how? By simply using a previous tried and tested formula that worked rather than trying to reinvent the wheel!

Personally I loved it when it was a Mk2 Escort Vs a Talbot Sunbeam. Perhaps not soul stirring machinery, but relevant to Joe Bloggs who drives something identifiably related. The modern WRCs are so re-engineered they might as well be silhouettes.

Fair enough, this is just a personal opinion. I think FlatOverCrest's analysis of why rallying's having such problems is more useful than mine. They grew the costs without growing the fanbase, sorta the same thing that did the NHL in.

FlatOverCreast and Risil - you're both right. It's a tragedy what has happened to the WRC for the reasons you've detailed. Special stages on tarmac and / or circuits are well and good, but with the endless parade of sparsely-sponsored, skinny-wheeled Citroens and Ford Focuses that sound like remote-controlled cars, people aren't going to be that interested.