MOTORSPORT: Rally Oz still sweating on future

Another week has gone by and there’s still no World Rally Championship calendar for next year, leaving uncertainty over whether Australia will have a round after the event at Coffs Harbour this November.

The calendar had been due from the World Motor Sport Council in mid-June, the announcement was postponed “until the end of June”, then it was expected last weekend, but still no word.

Perhaps it will come in the next couple of days or early next week after this weekend’s ‘inaugural promotional rally’ in Estonia, the country that has the driver leading this year’s WRC, Ott Tanak, and where the four manufacturer teams – Hyundai, Toyota, Citroen and M-Sport – are competing.

The delay in the calendar announcement appeared a week ago to have been because of the Safari Rally in Kenya being assessed for a return to the WRC after an 18-year absence.

That event was run last weekend, to the satisfaction of the company that promotes the WRC, although there were conflicting reports on how it went.

The online RallySport Magazine reported that it “ended in chaos when almost no crew was able to drive the final 36km stage without outside assistance”.

However, David Evans, rallying correspondent for Autosport, reported WRC Promoter managing director Oliver Ciesla saying the event had been “very, very good” and worthy of returning to the championship, although Evans said it was “not without safety issues”.

He quoted Ciesla saying that “the only sporting issue for the event was the deterioration of the final stage, which meant some of the crews had to be pulled through deep sand”.

The Safari and a Japanese round have been widely expected to be on the 2020 calendar, while Australia’s place at the end of the season has been up in the air, with New Zealand fighting to regain the Antipodean round – even if only for a year until another Australian location is found.

The WRC organisers have been concerned that Coffs Harbour is too far from a major population centre and does not attract big enough crowds.

While efforts to run one or more stages in or close to Sydney have come to nothing, Rally Oz organisers have remained confident of remaining in the championship beyond this year’s November 14-17 event.

Western Australia was home to Rally Oz for almost 20 years, with a super special stage in Perth each night and competition in outlying areas over three days.

NZ was a fixture on the WRC calendar for a long time but last hosted a round in 2012.

While the rally community across the Tasman has been keen to regain a place in the championship, reports several weeks ago indicated it was unable to raise enough money to assure WRC Promoter it was viable.

Daniel Ricciardo celebrates eight years in Formula 1 at this weekend’s British Grand Prix hoping to rediscover the “sweet spot” he and Renault seemed to have found before the disappointment of the Austrian GP on June 30.

The carsales.com.au global ambassador said that race at the Red Bull Ring, in which he finished only 12th and teammate Nico Hulkenberg 13th, “wasn’t a fun one for us really”.

“We [the Renault team] obviously got deep into it afterwards, tried to figure out why were off the pace, really, all weekend,” Ricciardo said.

“I definitely think we lacked some things with set-up. I think we just started in a direction which we kept pursuing, thinking it was the right way to go, but in hindsight it wasn’t.

“It’s probably more just a set-up misdirection we went for rather than anything crazy we found on the car.
“I think the car does have a little bit of a sweet spot and I think we had worked towards that the previous few weekends, getting those Q3s (into the final leg of qualifying), building that confidence and that momentum.

“But we shifted away from that in Austria for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time from a set-up point of view, but I think we moved away from something we got to know.

“We’ll try to bring it back this weekend for Silverstone and go back to what we know.”

“There’s an area where I feel more comfortable. Driving the car when I’m comfortable … I like it, and when we start going in a certain direction, that’s when we go into problems under braking or whatever.

“But when you do get it right, and it all kind of works in harmony, it’s an amazing feeling.”

In the immediate future he sees McLaren, using the same Renault power units with greater success, as Renault’s benchmark.

Ricciardo made his F1 debut at Silverstone in 2011, placed in the soon-to-fold HRT (Hispania Racing Team) by Red Bull, before two seasons racing for the energy drink company’s junior team Toro Rosso, then five seasons with Red Bull Racing before his switch to Renault this season.

He won seven GPs with RBR, had 22 other podiums and has now competed in 159 GPs, with a best place for Renault of sixth in Canada.

He was pleased at this week’s news that Britain would continue to host a GP at Silverstone, with F1 owner Liberty Media seemingly having reduced the race fee to maintain the ‘heritage’ event.

Other countries are seeking cuts in the mega fees in race contracts negotiated by former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, especially since Liberty last year apparently offered Miami a race without a fee – although the proposed street race there has not eventuated there.
While other promoters now have some leverage to have race fees reduced, they are to lose representation on a revamped F1 Commission.

F1’s technical, power unit and sporting regulations from 2021, as well as revenue distribution and governance procedures, remain in the melting pot – even more than the WRC calendar, long overdue.

An article by veteran F1 correspondent Dieter Rencken on RaceFans.net this week contained a couple of particularly pertinent observations:

“An inequitable revenue structure paid McLaren 33 per cent more prizemoney for placing ninth [in last year’s constructors’ world championship] than Renault received for fourth.”

“So lopsided is the 2013-2020 revenue structure that was inflicted on the sport by CVC [the private equity company that was the majority owner of F1 during Ecclestone’s final years in charge] that Ferrari could retire both cars at the end of the first lap of every GP between 2013 and 2020 yet still receive greater shares of F1’s revenues than would an independent team winning both titles [for drivers and constructors] consecutively.”

Team Penske drivers lead the NASCAR Cup (Joey Logano), the IndyCar series (Josef Newgarden), the American prototype sports car championship (Juan Pablo Montoya and Dane Cameron) and Australia’s Supercars Championship (Scott McLaughlin).

And yet another award awaits 82-year-old Roger ‘The Captain’ Penske – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s top civilian honour

Penske was rung midweek by US president Donald Trump with the news, which he said was “very humbling”.

“We’ll be setting up a date to go to the White House, probably in the next month or so,” Penske said.

“It’s very exciting for me, for my family, and certainly for our whole team and the people that have been around me to help me get to where I have been in life. This is more than about a sport. This is about your country. This is about you as an individual.

“I’ve been to the White House twice, first with Joey Logano when we won the NASCAR championship (last year), so we had the team there.

“The president invited us to come back with Simon Pagenaud and the team after we won the Indianapolis 500 [for a record 18th time in May].

“Then to get a phone call about the Presidential Medal of Freedom was just amazing.”

Ever the diplomat, Penske sidestepped the issue of Trump’s polarising personality, which keeps some prominent people away from the White House.

“I respect the office of the president. We’re in the United States. We compete here. We’re from here. We represent the country.

“I think it would have been tough for our team if we didn’t go because many people that work for us started really with nothing that work on our race teams. For them to be able to come and stand in the Oval Office next to the president with the trophy – it’s a lifetime experience.”

Although Penske’s twin-turbocharged V6 ARX-05 Acura (the premium brand of Honda in the US) is now the benchmark in Daytona prototype sports car racing in the US, having overtaken Cadillac’s naturally-aspirated V8, Mazda’s turbocharged four-cylinder RT24-Ps have finished first and second in the past two races.

Mazda’s belated success has come after a couple of years of input from Germany’s Joest Racing, which gave Audi such success at the 24 Hours of Le Mans for so long.

In NASCAR, where Penske races Ford Mustangs, there is talk of Hyundai entering the series, in which manufacturers are reported to be pushing heavily for partial electrification.