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New engines, rallies and a sprint format: WRC is a must-watch in 2024
Elite motorsport never stands still. World Rally Championship is entering a new era, adapting fast and making changes, here’s everything you need to know about WRC 2024.
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With its youngest-ever champion Kalle Rovanperä at the wheel, new events and a new sprint format, World Rally is heading into a new era of competition. The future of WRC is looking bright, so here’s everything you need to know about the World Rally Championship…
Kalle Rovanperä is a two-time world champion
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01
What's new in the Drivers’ Championship?
Having dominated the WRC for the past two seasons, defending champion Kalle Rovanperä is back in action but competing in a limited programme. He’s been rallying since his early teens and wants to enjoy a more relaxed year. “I want to make use of the time and do what I want to do,” he said. “It’s a time for my personal things out of motorsport. There are trips to take. I want to visit places where I want to go.”
That throws the World Rally Drivers’ Championship open to another driver to (potentially) claim the crown. Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans is in a championship-winning car and Hyundai lead driver Thierry Neuville are both contenders. M-Sport’s Adrien Fourmaux, Sébastien Ogier and Ott Tänak could also be in the running to claim the championship crown.
Adrien Fourmaux on track for M-Sport
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Where to watch WRC for free
Watch free WRC highlights on Red Bull TV! Red Bull TV delivers WRC highlights every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Witness the day's most heart-stopping moments without subscriptions. Head to Red Bull TV or download the app and search 'FIA World Rally Championship' to fuel your rally spirit.
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Which are the leading teams?
There are three teams, Toyota Gazoo Racing are the defending champions fielding Evans and Takamoto Katsuta as full-time drivers with world champions Rovanperä and Ogier doing partial programmes. Tänak returns to Hyundai where he and stalwart driver Neuville are joined by part-timers Esapekka Lappi, Dani Sordo and Andreas Mikkelsen. At M-Sport, Fourmaux is teamed with rookie Grégoire Munster where they’ll be racing the Ford Puma Rally1.
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New engines: less power but closer competition
The 130kW hybrid unit, combined with the 1.6-litre turbocharged engine, gives a current Rally1 car approximately 500 horsepower in short bursts – but all that is set to change. 2024 is the last season where the Rally1 cars will use a hybrid unit, which means the drivers will have 330hp to work with, but it also means a saving of €150,000 on the cost of the car and lowering the overall weight by 87kg. There will also be simpler aerodynamics to further reduce the costs and close the performance gap with Rally2 cars. For 2026, the cars will be larger and built around a safety cell, much like the tub seen on an F1 car, and the budget for the car will be capped at €400,000 – less than half the current level.
Global: WRC races on four continents
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What happens at a WRC rally?
The World Rally Championship is truly global, taking place across four continents and on a variety of surfaces from asphalt to gravel to dirt and snow. Drivers compete in temperatures from as hot as 42°C to as cold as -30°C. A rally is also a long event, starting with…
Recce: Usually two days where the crew practise the route at a limited speed to make detailed pace notes. In circuit racing, drivers lap the track 200 times during the weekend, but rally drivers may see a stage once a year. Recce helps them to determine their approach and exit speed and make a note of such hazards as water, rocks and jumps.
The WRC Service Park
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Shakedown: Thursday morning is a full-speed test where teams fine-tune the set-up of the cars to suit the surface. Extremes would be chunky tyres, high ride height and maximum play in the suspension for bumpy gravel stages and thin tyres, low-ride and stiff suspension for Tarmac.
Super Special Stage: Thursday evening is the ceremonial start followed by a crowd-pleasing Super Special Stage in the host city. The SSS take a variety of formats but among the most popular are head-to-heads where two cars race around a looping circuit or a sprint around a course with a selection of surfaces and obstacles.
Rally: Friday and Saturday comprise two long days of special rally stages, pushing cars and crews to the limit. The crews drive to the liaison at the start of the stage. Three zero cars – like pace cars in F1 – go through the stage at speed to ensure it’s clear of spectators before the leading car sets its time, followed at three-minute intervals by the next fastest.
The Ceremonial Start at Rally Monte Carlo
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Power Stage: Sunday features another full morning of rallying with a final Power Stage in the afternoon to bring the weekend to a close. The drivers then return to the host town for the podium and closing ceremony.
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What about strategy for World Rally?
Rally is intense. The drivers have to tackle four stages per session, following their pace notes to the letter while also responding to changes in the track surface. They can make repairs on the road, such as changing a flat tyre but serious repairs have to be done at the service park. And fastest isn’t always best: the first-placed driver opens the next stage the next morning. Drivers call this sweeping because overnight the surface will have got dirty and slippery, which puts the lead driver at a disadvantage. Tactics often come into play on the final stage of the day because, ideally, crews want to finish second-fastest rather than top in order to get the best starting place for the next morning.
Elfyn Evans in action at the Safari Rally
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The new 48hr Rally sprint format
This season, Rally Sardegna will unveil an experimental new compact schedule for a rally weekend, which sees the event run across 48 hours. Shakedown is on Friday morning with the opening four stages run in the afternoon. There are eight stages on Saturday with the final four on Sunday morning, with the rally wrapping by early afternoon. At a total race distance of 266km, it’s shorter than a full-length rally (usually 300km+) but not by much. But it is more spectator-friendly, less disruptive, and more expensive for organisers. If successful, this could be the shape of WRC in the future.
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How to win the World Rally Championship
The crews and teams score points at every round but the points scoring system has been overhauled to discourage teams from saving tyres for the Power Stage on Sunday. The top 10 finishers on Saturday score 18–15–13–10–8–6–4–3–2–1 points. On Sunday, the top seven score 7–6–5–4–3–2–1 points plus there's 5-4-3-2-1 points for the top five in the Sunday's Power Stage, making a maximum haul of 30 points available to the best crew.
In the Manufacturers' Championship, factory teams can enter up to three cars per rally but only the top two can score points in the championship. The crews are racing against the clock so the winner is the one with the shortest time over all the stages – ie the fastest overall.
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So why are changes coming to WRC?
Like any motorsport, World Rally needs to stay relevant to fans, manufacturers and promoters, so the FIA has established a WRC working group led by Dave Richards of Prodrive to work with the WRC to steer the championship. The challenges include lowering costs, making it easier for manufacturers to compete, improving safety, sustainability and competitiveness and making it easier for fans to keep pace with all the thrills of the championship.
The change to chassis rules also accommodates a wider choice of body shapes based on B class, C class, compact and SUVs as well as concept cars – all of which is designed to make WRC as attractive as possible to the car makers. Changes to the rally format make it less expensive for organisers and teams, with fewer days on location and fewer resources used up, while fans spend less time moving to new spectator points.
Thierry Neuville on the attack at Rally Monte-Carlo
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The 2024 Rally World Championship schedule
The 2024 season is made up of 13 rallies, starting with the world-famous Monte Carlo Rally and taking in iconic stops such as Safari Rally Kenya, Rally Finland and the Acropolis Rally. With action across four continents, there are two new rallies, Rally Latvia making its debut and Rally Poland which returns after last featuring in 2017. Next year also sees the drivers head to the mountains of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco.
Rally
Surface
Date
Rallye Monte-Carlo
Asphalt
Jan 25-28
Rally Sweden
Snow
Feb 15-18
Safari Rally Kenya
Gravel
March 28-31
Croatia Rally
Asphalt
April 18-21
Rally Portugal
Gravel
May 9-12
Rally Italia-Sardegna
Gravel
May 30-Jun 2
Rally Poland
Gravel
June 27-30
Rally Latvia
Gravel
July 18-21
Rally Finland
Gravel
Aug 1-4
Acropolis Rally Greece
Gravel
Sept 5-8
Rally Chile
Gravel
Sept 26-29
Central European Rally
Asphalt
Oct 31-Nov 3
Rally Japan
Asphalt
Nov 21-24
11
A quick history of the WRC
French marque Alpine were the first champions, and its stunning A110 was the star. The winning drivers? At first, that was less important than the car. It took until 1977 for a prize to be awarded to the winning driver and co-driver, but there wasn’t a driver’s World Rally Champion crowned until Björn Waldegård in 1979. With ABBA topping the charts and Borg winning the tennis, 1979 was a great year to be Björn.
Since then, the title has been taken by 16 drivers with two Frenchmen dominating the record books – Sébastien Loeb with nine titles and Sébastien Ogier with eight. The defending World Champion is the youngest ever and all signs point to the brilliant Kalle Rovanperä dominating WRC for the foreseeable future.
2 min
Animated history of rallying
Dive into the history of the World Rally Championship in this animated guide.
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The development of World Rally cars
Since rally began, the cars have evolved as manufacturers road-test the latest developments for production cars. In the first decade, it was rear-wheel drive cars such as the Ford Escort RS, the Fiat 131 Abarth and the head-turning Lancia Stratos. In the 80s, the new Group B rules saw the introduction of turbos which lead to the game-changing four-wheel drive Audi Quattro.
Sebastien Ogier pilots the VW Polo R
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The stunning hot-hatches of Group B ushered in the glory years of WRC, but two serious accidents in 1986 spelled the end of the era and the advent of Group A. This new generation were more closely based on production cars and cheaper to produce, opening up the championship to new teams and crews. Lancia led the way with the Delta Integrale, and by the 90s, the championship was dominated by the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Toyota Celica GT4.
With manufacturers struggling to make street-legal rally cars, the WRC introduced World Rally Cars in 1997, ushering in an era of dominance first for Citroën with the Xsara, C4 and DS3 and then VW and the Polo R WRC. The rules were tweaked for 2017 to give the cars much more power and more aero components to keep them planted. In 2022, WRC ushered in greener Hybrids in 2022 with the power to the fuel-efficient engines boosted by a 100Kw electric engine, boosting output to more than 500bhp. In 2025, those will make way for simpler and sturdy turbocharged 1.6l engines to reduce costs and increase competition in the championship.
Dream team: Kalle and Jonne celebrate victory with Toyota Gazoo Racing
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13
A WRC round from Kalle Rovanperä’s POV
Rovanperä’s mental preparation starts days before the rally when he’ll study videos from previous rallies, mainly onboard clips, but if there is a new stage, the WRC provides recce videos to help the crews learn the stage.
When Rovanperä and co-driver Jonne Halttunen arrive at the service park, they have a long list of checks to perform, from recceing the stage to make pace notes to meeting the team to discuss the best set-ups and rally strategy. After shakedown, the ceremonial start and the Super Special on Thursday, they approach the start line at the first Special Stage. This is when the crew has to clear their minds and focus on their performance.
"When I'm actually on the start line and getting ready to drive, I have my own small routines: I clap my hands to wake me up a bit and to help me focus," explains Rovanperä. "Then I take about 20 seconds to clear my mind, shut everything out and concentrate."
Fridays are long days behind the wheel, and it’s night when the cars return to the Service Park, and it's even later before Rovanperä can have dinner and return to his hotel. “Friday is a busy day, and we don’t finish until it’s late, so after rallying, we watch videos of Saturday’s stages to prepare. It’s quite a long night.”
Saturday is another long day, and there's no let-up until after Sunday afternoon's Power Stage before heading to the finish and (hopefully) the podium. "That's the best part because a rally is six days of hard work and if you have a good result, it's a great feeling of accomplishment. It's really nice to relax and just enjoy this feeling." Sunday night might involve a fun team dinner or a reception with a sponsor or – just as likely – heading straight home ready to start prepping for the next round.
Ott Tänak baptises new champion Kalle Rovanperä in New Zealand
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More on Kalle Rovanperä
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The rules of WRC
Bouncing over jagged rocks and huge jumps, the cars take a lot of punishment, and the driver and co-driver need to be able to carry out running repairs such as a quick tyre change or bending bodywork back in shape. The rally car is loaded with basic equipment, including various tools, duct tape and a jack to lift the car. No one else can work on the car, but fans can help push a car back onto the road or tip it back onto all four wheels – a perk of being a spectator.
Crews can’t tinker with the set-up of the car or anything that might affect performance without getting a time penalty. That can be a calculated risk but major work has to be carried out by the mechanics in the Service Park. Even then, it has to be within strictly regulated periods of 15 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at lunchtime and 45 minutes in the evening. Overnight, the cars are locked up and stored.
If the cars can’t be fixed on stage, they can be towed back to the Service Park, and if the team can fix it, the crew can restart the next morning with a 10-minute tie penalty. It’s not unheard of for teams to still pick up points after a restart from a high finish or a power stage.
If a rally car – or one of the crew – is damaged beyond repair on stage, it is retired.
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The WRC support series
As well as the main championship, a WRC rally incorporates several support competitions that act as a proving ground for talent looking for a seat in the premier championship.
WRC2: The Rally2-spec cars are the equivalent of the R5 cars with competitive cars like the Ford Fiesta, Skoda Fabia R5 and Citroen C3, Toyota GR Yaris and Hyundai i20 N. Crews can enter up to seven rallies in the season with the best six results counting toward their championship. Limiting the number of rounds keeps costs down and creates more opportunities for drivers: in 2024, there are 50 crews competing in WRC2oring points from five.
Junior WRC: This is where the future drivers of the WRC hone their skills at the major rallies in the championship and alongside the top crews and teams. Graduates include Sébastien Ogier, Elfyn Evans and Thierry Neuville. In this case, Junior is a pretty broad term as drivers up to 30 years old are eligible. To keep costs down, they drive the same Fiesta Rally3s models used in WRC3. The championship crew wins free entry to compete in WRC2 at four European WRC rounds at the wheel of a Ford Fiesta Rally2 prepared by M-Sport.
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