In 2014 Lydden Hill will be a World Championship venue. First of all, how cool does that sound? This one-mile loop in Kent will play host to the second round of the 2014 FIA World Rallycross Championship. I for one will be stood on the Canterbury Straight come May 24 to watch a full-on world championship hit Lydden. But for more reasons than because I've got a soft spot for the track.
In fact, I've got a soft spot for the sport - and I reckon Formula 1 could learn a thing or two from Rallycross.
Lydden's own Liam Doran plays world stage
For years, the mixed surface discipline has lived in the
shadows of WRC
, making do with European status. But throughout that time it's developed quite the cult following. And while Formula 1 has increasingly been alienating fans, Rallycross has been amassing an army of followers and is ready to explode onto the world stage.
It's this great fan base which should see it succeed. Take a guess what the FIA's European Race Series of the Year in 2013 was? FIA GT3, with its grids full of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches and McLarens? Nope. The European Le Mans Series, offering spectators bespoke carbon fibre prototypes. Guess again. It was European Rallycross. Seems that World Championship status in 2014 is justified, then.
Over 72,000 spectators turned up to the French round of the continental series last year to watch loose surface legend and annihilator of the Pikes Peak hill climb record, Sebastien Loeb, take on the huge character that is Petter Solberg and factory Citroen driver Kris Meeke - not to mention drivers like Liam Doran (that family name runs deep in Rallycross) and reigning champ Timur Timerzyanov.
Doran Senior is a Rallycross legend too
In the process, racegoers can get up close and personal to the drivers - and more importantly, the personalities. People want to chat to the stars, they want to know what makes each driver tick. At the very least they want an autograph, and in F1 they just can't get that.
It's not necessarily the drivers' fault. They don't dictate what they can and can't do. But the sponsors, who ultimately stump up the cash to go racing, decide who has what commitments and when. Money talks, after all.
But it goes beyond that. PHers are blessed with a vested interest; we're petrolheads who want to watch close racing, but even we get bored by artificial competition, with cars on fresh tyres in a DRS zone blowing by their rivals on the straights. That's not racing. That's a semi-orchestrated massacre.
The average Joe sitting in his armchair on a Sunday afternoon arguably can't relate to the technology, either - even with Formula 1 moving to a more efficiency-based rulebook this year (yeah, we won't go into those nose designs here) to supposedly show the road car market the way, communicating to the paying punter what ERS-K and ERS-H actually are, and why the downsized V6 turbos don't sound quite as crisp as the 2.4 V8 screamers, is not the work of a moment. With Rallycross, fans can understand the humble formula.
What's not to like about action like this?
It's a simple recipe: take a grid of fire-spitting, 550hp-plus hatchbacks representative of cars you can buy in the showroom for £10K or less, make them do 0-60mph in less than 2.5 seconds on gravel (they'll actually pull similar g loadings on tarmac to a space shuttle launch...), strap some famous drivers into the hot seats and line them up five abreast on a split-surface stage. You're bound to get some seriously interesting - and sideways - results.
With more manufacturers committing to the series now its gained World Championship status - Peugeot is the latest marque to commit to 2014, for example - the bigger the sport should grow, too.
There's one former F1 World Champion who's been rather vocal about both championships recently. Last week Jacques Villeneuve confirmed he'll be racing in this year's WorldRX series. He also said he doesn't 'get' modern Formula 1, and that the sport was now "artificial" and in danger of losing the respect of its fans.
Wild cars, wild driving - Rallycross always had it
Double points, DRS, uninteresting driver personalities, "for sure" - Villeneuve cites them all as reasons why F1 is boring (well apart from the last one, that's mine). There's no fakery in Rallycross. It proves that good race events can be staged for less than a single F1 team's weekend champagne bill.
Real, unmolested cars, real drivers and a solid, reliable rulebook. That's what F1 needs, and why the new FIA World Rallycross Championship could show it a thing or two in 2014.