Anyone over 20 years old thats still remembers the good old days of the Cosworths, Celicas, or even Gr.b will feel a bit disapointed about the current WRC championship: There is no more night stages, rallies are run from 9am to 5pm like some ordinary job, there are all those new tricky rules from the SupeRally crap and manufacturers are going away. There are even talk of the FWD S2000 cars replace the WRC, wich aparently makes the remaining makes loose even more interest and drivers wanna go home, like Gronholm recently said.
Worst S2000 is a big piece of shít!
It was created because European manufacturers were tired to see Japanese makes dominate Gr.N racing. So they pressured the FIA to recreate the F2 categorie for their boring models to win, instead of making cars to face the Evo and Impreza...
But officially is said to be an "alternative" to Gr.N at LOWER prices but the truth is a S2000 cost TWICE AS MUCH as a Gr.N and so far only Fiat has a competitive model with the Grand Punto, the Peugeot 207 is still in development and has far has I know the engine sucks, and VW and Toyota have poorly developed cars in the South African championship...
This is all because of one man: David Richards.
I dont like him at all. First its strange a manager of one of the participants (he owns Prodrive) is put in charge of the championship he participates.
Second since he has taken over, all his decisions are all to please the makes and sponsors and never to improve the competition.
And personaly I have another reason to hate him: he pressured the FPAK (portuguese racing federation) to move the portuguese rally to the South, destroing the event, taking it away from the traditional, and famous and most demanding stages there are, so it would please the strong tourist industry of Algarve...
With things like that, no wonder rally is now part of the X games...