Earlier this week, Ireland’s governing body announced its plans to re-enter the World Rally Championship with a three-year agreement. The project still requires funding from the state to confirm Ireland’s return to the calendar.
Ireland plans to host the rally between 2025-27, with the rally’s hub located in a different city each year. Kerry, Limerick, and Waterford were selected as the rally centers.
Motorsport Ireland boss Harper elaborated on this unusual solution in an interview with Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE.
“There was no differentiation between the three of them in our final scoring matrix system. We couldn’t actually pick one winner so our job was made very hard. So we worked with the motorsport promoter in WRC to see would it be possible to move around three locations in three years. It has been done in other countries and that’s the model that we went with,” Harper said.
Then Harper made a comment that might not have been intended for public knowledge at this stage.
“There are new changes coming in which we’ve just learned about in the last week. WRC will take the new change in 2025 where some of the team structures will become smaller and will become more mobile and some of the infrastructure that will be required won’t be as required as before, so that actually helped our thinking process when it came up to the final crunch and that was only released to us late last week,” Harper revealed.
WRC Promoter announced last year that changes to the competition’s concept would be made in the coming years. A significant change was made this year when the points system was radically altered.
The promoter’s original plan was to introduce changes gradually, not all at once. Harper’s statement might suggest that so-called remote services will play a more significant role in WRC from the 2025 season onwards.
Last fall, WRC Promoter told selected media, including RallyJournal.com, that remote services are part of its plans. With their help, competition days could be condensed, and the rally would reach more people as all services would not be concentrated in one place.
