RE: Five things I learned from going to Wales Rally GB

RE: Five things I learned from going to Wales Rally GB

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Discussion

Craikeybaby

10,369 posts

224 months

Tuesday 8th October 2019
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I enjoyed the article and it has confirmed that I really should get to a Welsh forest to watch it one year!

alistair1234

1,129 posts

145 months

Tuesday 8th October 2019
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Anyone that thinks the cars aren’t as impressive as Group B, or you have to stick to spectator zones miles away from the stage, watch this video.

https://youtu.be/VT9vp-McH5Q

Just look at the clip of Meeke at 00:20

If you’ve never been, don’t go to the stupid specials like Oulton Park/Chirk/Tir Prince, get to the car park the night before, sleep in the car and get in to the forest a couple of hours before the first cars to find the best spots away from all of the crowds.

hothatchery7

103 posts

74 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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300bhp/ton said:
Jon_S_Rally said:
Sadly, a lot of rally fans are allergic to change laugh
Not really. In fact it is the opposite.

The current regs are stagnated as they do NOT allow change. It is a formula, that all the cars have to be built almost exactly the same, just finished off with a fake bodyshell on top. To make it appear as though it relates to that brand.

Im sorry but I worked at M-sport for 5 years. It is no way a ‘fake’ shell on top. It’s a bog standard modified shell. There are very strict FIA rules regarding this. Group A is nowhere near like the production models spawned to enable the class. Different suspension pickup points, heavy shell modification, totally different gearboxes diffs engine wishbones dampers hubs shafts etc etc. There has never been a production car close to its rally version apart from group b. And even then a standard 205 t16 has many cheap different parts and only 200bhp roughly compared to the 500 from the rally car.

And how does once you’ve seen a wrc car you’ve seen them all work?
Sorry but seeing many mk2 escorts etc is just the same. WRC cars are faster than anything else on a stage and you go watch them take corners at 90 fully committed and tell me there boring.



FiF

43,960 posts

250 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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Due to the quoting disaster I think hothatchery wrote this

hothatchery7 said:
There has never been a production car close to its rally version apart from group b.
Unbelievable.

mwstewart

7,554 posts

187 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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Great pics.

redlancer

100 posts

164 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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We've just done 4 days in the forests.
shakedown, Dyfnant, slate mountains, Hafren, Alwyn.
Me and my mate, through mud tinted glasses, talk about the old great days off following the rally around.
Yet being from chester we base ourselves in mid/north wales.
Its knackering these days, 2x4am and 2x7am starts to get to the stages.
It still takes a bit of planning, so that element is there, but worth it.
I'm sure the cost to run an event these days is way higher, speaking to someone they got about £10k for a 2-3mile stage but cost them £15k to put it right after the cars. So doing the number of different stages, apart from logistics, could be financially impossible.
Wonder what the complaints would of been about the rally in the 70's if we had social media then

These cars are spectacular, and those saying its not like the old days for the variety, I'd say opposite is true as with the national field you get the old as well as the new

This year, could be our chosen spots, I'd say the quality of the international field was excellent and exciting, we enjoyed all the cars from WRC, WRC2, r2's etc was some excellent driving.
Then wait for nationals and get a sprinkling of Escorts, Integrale, 911, old WRC etc

As for coverage, has been said, social media has everything.
I love the WRC+ coverage, around £80 for the year and every stage live. We didn't used to have that. some stages we had enough signal to watch the rally while we waited, that did feel wrong.

Speaking to many of the foreign spectators, I get the impression we have better event than most.
not as strict, rally planners, maps, car parks etc were some of the comments

cerb4.5lee

30,188 posts

179 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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alistair1234 said:
Anyone that thinks the cars aren’t as impressive as Group B, or you have to stick to spectator zones miles away from the stage, watch this video.

https://youtu.be/VT9vp-McH5Q

Just look at the clip of Meeke at 00:20

If you’ve never been, don’t go to the stupid specials like Oulton Park/Chirk/Tir Prince, get to the car park the night before, sleep in the car and get in to the forest a couple of hours before the first cars to find the best spots away from all of the crowds.
Cheers for that. I definitely need to start going again and that looked great to me, plus nice and close to the action.

Mr Peel

478 posts

121 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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For the first time in several years I couldn't make it this time. Glad it got on the PH radar though. Great to read some positive posts for once. Does any subject bring out the 'good old days' brigade more than rallying?

300bhp/ton

41,030 posts

189 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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hothatchery7 said:
Im sorry but I worked at M-sport for 5 years. It is no way a ‘fake’ shell on top.
By fake I was meaning sharing no body panels with a production car. It's fake as in it is a complete fabrication.



hothatchery7 said:
Group A is nowhere near like the production models spawned to enable the class.
This would depend on which Group A cars you are looking at. the 1995 Impreza I posted above is far more similar to a production model than ANY WRC class car is. And by a huge margin. Also the majority of the parts would have been fitted to homologation models, so would have been sold to the public at some point. That was the entire point of the class.

However if we look at earlier Group A cars such as these:


Then they are even closer to their showroom counterparts.


And lets not forget, Group A was by and large just a renaming of Group 2 with a few changes. But Group 2 existed since 1959 I beleive. And gave us loads of fantastic and awesome rally cars.

cerb4.5lee

30,188 posts

179 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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bloomen said:
Impressive stuff.

Some pretty stupid spectators in those clips along with some moans about a stage being cancelled so clearly someone noticed.
Yes and there were a few that were pushing their luck a little too far to be fair. I like to be close but I also want to be alive by the end of it!

bloomen

6,851 posts

158 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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alistair1234 said:
Anyone that thinks the cars aren’t as impressive as Group B, or you have to stick to spectator zones miles away from the stage, watch this video.

https://youtu.be/VT9vp-McH5Q

Just look at the clip of Meeke at 00:20
Impressive stuff.

Some pretty stupid spectators in those clips along with some moans about a stage being cancelled so clearly someone noticed.


300bhp/ton said:
This would depend on which Group A cars you are looking at. the 1995 Impreza I posted above is far more similar to a production model than ANY WRC class car is. And by a huge margin. Also the majority of the parts would have been fitted to homologation models, so would have been sold to the public at some point. That was the entire point of the class.
The difference between the tech in a Gp A 96 Impreza 555 and 97 WRC car will be fairly minor. Both of them would have cost hundreds of thousands and there's no way average Joe would've been able to get their hands on any of the parts at the time.

Early WRC cars would've mainly had more freedom with the shell but Group A cars often had different suspension pick up points to road cars and plenty more too.

You would indeed have been in with a shot at building an 80s Gp A car that wasn't a million miles from a works car. After that it turns mega bucks and full bespoke just like any other unobtainable exotica.

300bhp/ton

41,030 posts

189 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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bloomen said:
You've got some quaint ideas about Group A.


"Group A was a set of motorsport regulations introduced by FIA covering production-derived vehicles intended for outright competition in touring car racing and rallying."

"Group A referred to production-derived vehicles limited in terms of power, weight, allowed technology and overall cost. Group A was aimed at ensuring numerous privately owned entries in races."

Homologation
"To qualify for approval, a minimum of 2500 cars of the competing model had to be built in one year, out of 25,000 for the entire range of the model (e.g.: 2500 Subaru Impreza WRX, out of 25,000 Subaru Impreza). Up to 1991, the requirement was a minimum of 5000 cars in one year, without regard to the entire range, but the FIA allowed "Evolution" models to be homologated with a minimum of 500 cars (e.g.: BMW M3 Sport Evo, Mercedes-Benz W201 Evo, Nissan Skyline GT-R NISMO). Rules also required some of the interior panels to be retained, e.g. interior door panels and dashboard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_A




bloomen said:
The difference in tech between the tech in a 96 Impreza 555 and 97 WRC car will be very little.
Having a quick look and the 1997 WRC car (first year) had a sequential transmission I believe. And was significantly different to the Group A cars.

bloomen

6,851 posts

158 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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300bhp/ton said:
Having a quick look and the 1997 WRC car (first year) had a sequential transmission I believe. And was significantly different to the Group A cars.
I seem to recall the first Impreza WRC being H pattern but the linkage bit is the least exotic.

Anyway the rise of Prodrive and Ralliart is probably what pushed rule interpretations, design and fabrication to a level that makes Gp A's supposed accessibility to all a bit of a joke.

The last time anyone could build something competitive off the relative shelf might have been something like the 4x4 Sapphire Cosworths. After that it took off into space.

Olivera

7,065 posts

238 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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bloomen said:
The last time anyone could build something competitive off the relative shelf might have been something like the 4x4 Sapphire Cosworths. After that it took off into space.
Not really, for example the Group A Escort Cosworth retained the rear suspension semi-trailing arm design of the road car, and I think the pickup points were also either the same or very similar. The implementation was a little different, but the general design was the same for homologation reasons, despite this being a primitive setup even for the early 90s!

Road car:



Group A:



anonymous-user

53 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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ilovequo said:
The Beeb only seem to air gender neutral yet all-female non contact sports with a 'politically impartial' but highly left wing tendancies at the moment...
Lets keep them as far away from Rallying as possible
I wonder what state of mind you have to be in, to not only pen such utter bilge, but read it through and think to yourself “nailed it”?

Jon_S_Rally

Original Poster:

3,385 posts

87 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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300bhp/ton said:
But that was the point. In past times you'd get the variety of vehicles at a single event running the same stages. Sure they might not all have been competing directly with each other, but they were their to be viewed and heard.

The fact you have plucked a couple of random cars that run only very specific events, that are mostly impossible for the average Brit to go and see easily and that aren't competing or entering the Wales GB rally, really sums up there is less variety today.
Yes, and on current WRC rallies, you have WRC, which has four different cars, R5, which has 5-10 possibilities now, R2 which has another few different cars and, on select rounds, R-GT, which has a couple more. Then on WRGB you also have the national field, which has loads of different stuff from various eras. Is there less variety than there has been at some points? Maybe, but there is still variety.

300bhp/ton said:
I just can't see how the figures add up.

Homologating a vehicle isn't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things. As many major components already exist. So the development costs go into building a race car. But then you also recoup some of these costs by actually selling the cars. E.g. the Impreza Spec C's and the like.

With the WRC format you don't have any major components to start with and you have the entire development costs of building a car from scratch. Which must be more costly. And then you don't recoup any costs at all as they aren't sold.

Group B cars I can understand a little more. Very bespoke, so potentially expensive to build, but required in high enough numbers that you couldn't employ two people in a shed to build them. Which then also made them very expensive to buy, and thus difficult to sell. But Group A (maybe bar the last couple of years where the rules where being pushed a bit too far) this wasn't the case at all. And we ended up with lovely road going cars like the Type R/RA, GT-Four and many others.

Edited by 300bhp/ton on Wednesday 9th October 09:22
You're right, you do get some of those costs back by selling a road-going version of your homologation special but, for the rally version (certainly for Group A), virtually all the mechanical parts were changed, so the costs of developing the rally car were still there. Maybe they would have been less in the very early days of Group A but, as soon as it replaced Group B, the costs rocketed as they were manufacturer teams with manufacturer budgets.

DelicaL400 said:
Which is why there is the logbooking process - if you don't know what you're doing your car won't get a logbook. Andrew Burton did know what he was doing, his car was arguably safer than most in terms of its construction. Yet the MSA banned it. Meanwhile shed-built specials are still allowed on hill climbs, rallycross, comp safaris etc etc.
They are, and some of the stuff I've seen on hill climbs is frightening to be honest. I wouldn't do 30mph in it, let alone 130. They do seem to be getting tougher on hill climb now, as a friend has had his home-built chassis knocked back without having the roll hoop tested. The change in regulations was draconian and I don't think it was entirely helpful, particularly as it has outlawed the proto cars that are getting popular in Europe, but I can still understand why the decision was made, even if I don't fully agree with it. Let's face it, rallying hasn't died without Burton's car, no matter how much we liked it.

Mr Peel said:
For the first time in several years I couldn't make it this time. Glad it got on the PH radar though. Great to read some positive posts for once. Does any subject bring out the 'good old days' brigade more than rallying?
Definitely not. Rallying is one of the most stuck-in-the-past, rose-tinted-spectacles-wearing sports going laugh

300bhp/ton said:
This would depend on which Group A cars you are looking at. the 1995 Impreza I posted above is far more similar to a production model than ANY WRC class car is. And by a huge margin. Also the majority of the parts would have been fitted to homologation models, so would have been sold to the public at some point. That was the entire point of the class.

However if we look at earlier Group A cars such as these:


Then they are even closer to their showroom counterparts.

And lets not forget, Group A was by and large just a renaming of Group 2 with a few changes. But Group 2 existed since 1959 I beleive. And gave us loads of fantastic and awesome rally cars.
Yes, a WRC car is more modified from the production base than a Group A car but, by allowing that, more manufacturers were encouraged to join the sport. Would we have got WRC cars from Peugeot, Citroen, Seat, Skoda if they had been forced to produce a road-going version? I doubt it.

Also, while the public could buy the homologated road-going version of a Group A car, realistically, that car shared virtually no parts with the rally car, so the link was far more strenuous than some like to believe. As someone said above, every suspension part, the transmission, dampers, sub frames, drive shafts, engine internals etc etc etc were ALL changed. Maybe in the early days of Group A, there might have been more parts from the road car on the rally car, but that would have very quickly changed, as the rules allowed it. Even a Group A Sierra Cosworth was far-removed from the road car. The only cars that were representative of the road cars in that era were Group N, and even that was questionable at times.

One thing I did like was that a privateer could slowly build a Group A car, upgrading their Group N car by fitting Group A bits a bit at a time, but none of the cars in the WRC were like that in reality, just the privateers at the back. It's a shame that we've lost that path of being able to buy a car and upgrade it. I am not a fan of the way people are forced to buy a kit of parts to build a car, as I think it forces costs up.

The first Impreza WRC retained the H-pattern box, basically as it was, from the Group A car. The suspension wasn't that different, albeit wider, and even the engine was only an evolution of the Group A version, albeit with a different turbo, exhaust and cooling package. For the first year it was very much a wide track Group A car from what I have been told, but was upgraded as time went on.

Olivera said:
Not really, for example the Group A Escort Cosworth retained the rear suspension semi-trailing arm design of the road car, and I think the pickup points were also either the same or very similar. The implementation was a little different, but the general design was the same for homologation reasons, despite this being a primitive setup even for the early 90s!

Road car:



Group A:

It retained the same operating principle for the suspension. One is a lump made from tubular and pressed sheet steel, while one is fully adjustable and made from mag alloy - I suspect there was a fair difference in price between the two!

Pick-up points had to remain within 20mm (or maybe 25mm, I can't remember) of the standard position, so you could alter the behaviour of the car quite a lot in reality.

300bhp/ton

41,030 posts

189 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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Jon_S_Rally said:
Yes, and on current WRC rallies, you have WRC, which has four different cars, R5, which has 5-10 possibilities now, R2 which has another few different cars and, on select rounds, R-GT, which has a couple more.
I'm not wanting to come across as whinging about everything. That isn't my intention at all.

The Group R cars are potentially interesting. But I think, they suffer two major issues:

-They are promoted very much as an 'also-ran' class
-They are also heavily restricted as a "Formula" class of cars

Group A suffered this too. But the structure of the R classes means, once again you end up with all the cars competing in that class looking and sounding exactly the same. Which for me is largely the basis of the entire reason why it isn't overly interesting. It just doesn't allow for innovation and variety.

And as a result of this you end up with a field of rally cars, all based on very dull road cars. I simply do not want to see ugly hatchbacks being used as the basis of a rally car. But the structure of Group R seems to heavily promote using a dull car as your basis.

The R-GT would on paper appear to have a lot of potential. But clearly suffers from a total lack of entrants (3 cars and even a cancelled championship the other year). I think trying to separate them out with more regulations is the problem. When you look back at past decades, the Triumph TR7 V8 wasn't separated from the Escort. And the Rover SD1 was in the same class as a Pug 205.

Looking at how R-GT is structured, it would almost appear to be a token effort to shut people up saying a coupe/sports car can't be used. But done in away that practically kills any chance of success. Either way, they certainly aren't cars you are likely to be able to see very often in the UK and considering how poor the WRC television coverage is, I suspect you really have to go out of your way to watch them at all.

Jon_S_Rally said:
Maybe they would have been less in the very early days of Group A but, as soon as it replaced Group B, the costs rocketed as they were manufacturer teams with manufacturer budgets.
Jon_S_Rally said:
Also, while the public could buy the homologated road-going version of a Group A car, realistically, that car shared virtually no parts with the rally car, so the link was far more strenuous than some like to believe. As someone said above, every suspension part, the transmission, dampers, sub frames, drive shafts, engine internals etc etc etc were ALL changed.
The specification of the parts might have been different, but they were by and large very similar still. But they weren't as a rule radically different designs bearing little or no commonality.

And the biggest thing is, they didn't look like they were different. Even if they were under the skin. And there really would have been something in the showroom that resembled them. Nobody is claiming you could buy a road model, slap a cage in and have a Grp A rally car. But the persona of the car being sold was a road going rally car you could use every day.

For many it is that tangible link that was important. At least it was for me.


Olivera

7,065 posts

238 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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Jon_S_Rally said:
It retained the same operating principle for the suspension. One is a lump made from tubular and pressed sheet steel, while one is fully adjustable and made from mag alloy - I suspect there was a fair difference in price between the two!

Pick-up points had to remain within 20mm (or maybe 25mm, I can't remember) of the standard position, so you could alter the behaviour of the car quite a lot in reality.
The fully adjustable one from magnesium alloy is still an utterly primitive design even for the early 90s. My point being that they had to stick to this rear semi-trailing arm design because that's what the homologated road car had.

Ergo there *is* a significant amount of commonality between the road car and Group A car.

ArnageWRC

2,050 posts

158 months

Wednesday 9th October 2019
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300bhp/ton said:
Looking at how R-GT is structured, it would almost appear to be a token effort to shut people up saying a coupe/sports car can't be used. But done in away that practically kills any chance of success. Either way, they certainly aren't cars you are likely to be able to see very often in the UK and considering how poor the WRC television coverage is, I suspect you really have to go out of your way to watch them at all.
In my mind it is a token gesture by the FiA, they've set up a GT class, but gone about it so that it's a major pain to actually homologate and enter. Instead of allowing any GT3 car (and seemingly, there are hundreds of them) they've made it difficult to make the GT cars into a R-GT class car. So, there are very few that have actually turned up.
Not only that, but how many rounds in the WRC could a R-GT car actually enter? In 2020 there are only 3 out of 14 rounds with Tarmac. It should have been closer to 5 or 6.

My fantasy is a Tarmac only championship full of R-GT cars; a sort of rally version of the Blancpain GT Race series. But I fear I maybe waiting....

Trophy Husband

3,924 posts

106 months

Thursday 10th October 2019
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Last year all of the cars transited past our house between Trefriw and Crafnant Lake. My young kids and I sat in the back of the Ranger with the rear hatch open, snacks and pop for them and a few beers for me. The sound from the top motors rasping through the woods was epic and even transiting they were not hanging about! My boys loved it!
I travelled back from Anglesey through Gwydyr Forest last week and the roads were lined with campers and cars, people milling about chatting, drinking and waiting for the car park to open. I stopped to have a chat with a few youngsters and they were so excited. Good on them for having such a wholesome interest. Pity they didn't come our way this year.