Wheatley on Future Plans of FIA on Rally1

Predicting where the automobile industry will go in the future is a difficult task and one that the FIA must master to ensure the professional continuation of production-based motorsport.

The World Rally Championship is included, with direct manufacturer involvement in all of its classes and factory entries in the new hybrid Rally1 class at the top, which will be introduced in 2022. As a result, part of Andrew Wheatley’s task as the FIA’s new rally director is to construct a picture of what those manufacturers and their road-going rivals are up to outside of rallying to guide future choices of the sport’s governing body, regulators, and promoters must make.

Rally1 will be the WRC’s top class in its current form until at least the end of 2024, possibly 2026, and, as with World Rally Cars (the world championship’s main formula from 1997 to 2021), there will be evolutions in the years after that to better optimise rallying’s top-class technically while also keeping it road-relevant.

Wheatley commenting on Rally1’s future said, “One of the first jobs that I’ve got in the championship and in the role that I’ve got at the moment is consolidating 2022’s big changes in off-road motorsport. But the first thing, my role is to sit there and listen to everybody, and that’s what I’m doing at the moment. We’re working, planning with the promoter to go to talk to all the stakeholders, and that’s the manufacturers, the organisers, the promoters, the spectators, the media, the competitors, everybody who is involved, and to listen to everybody in order to understand what we think is the new generation or direction that automotive is going to go. I don’t think anybody can actually tell us right now what automotive is going to look like in six to 10 years, and what we’re looking at at the moment is absorbing all that information, recovering all that information, and from that I think a plan will emerge. And from that we will sit down as the FIA, with the promoters, and work out what the schedule’s going to be. One thing that’s for sure is the Rally1 cars are not going to be dramatically different as we go forward. 70-80% of the work what’s been done now, we’ll carry over into the next evolution and probably the next evolution.”

The electric motor and compositing technology utilised by the WRC’s present and prospective future manufacturers for their road fleets, the majority of which are completely electrified, should see a significant advancement in the next years owing to research and development in those fields. Wheatley, as the FIA’s rally director, does not want to put pressure on manufacturers to apply those improvements in competition mindlessly, at the expense of the significant effort that has already been done.

Wheatly added, “The work that’s been done by the manufacturers in the last 18 months, two years is huge. Genuinely, there is very little of this current generation of cars that carries over from the previous WRC cars, and we’re not going to just upside down and say ‘right, everything stops’. These are here for the next evolution. We are trying to talk to absolutely everybody, because as I said the problem that we’ve got is that automotive doesn’t have a clearly fixed plan. And we need to get as much data and as much feedback from everybody. That’s the really interesting thing at the moment, to understand how we can find a plan or a route or a vision through this next five to eight years.”