REMEMBER THE R4 CONCEPT... NO? WELL, WE WENT AND FOUND ONE
Remember talk about the new r4 formula… no? well, David evans has see none first-hand
Read this and you’ll be able to sleep once more. Your worries will be over, your knowledge complete. I am, you see, about to explain R4.
Remember that? Thought not. Rallying’s lost category has finally come to life.
Everybody knows about the other Rs: one, two, three and, of course, the World Rally Championship’s second division formula: R5.
But R4? It looked to have been lost to the FIA’S darkest recesses. There’s a vague recollection of it being talked about, but did anything ever happen?
It did. And now things are really starting to happen with French preparation expert ORECA having built and started running the kit.
One of FIA president Jean Todt’s objectives from the moment he arrived in the job has been to create a family of rallying. A global, sideways community, if you like. And for the last few years FIA rally director Jarmo Mahonen has been trying to fathom how one size can possibly fit all. How Asian priorities can work in Africa or whether the deserts of the Middle East can find the same page as Europe.
The foundation of bringing these disparate series together has to be a workable common car. It was hoped R5 could be that category, but the rising cost and geographical challenge presented by the FIA’S further-flung regional rally championships have created an imbalance; Europe has no shortage of Ford Fiesta or Skoda Fabia R5s, but head south, east or west and it’s a different story. Servicing such a car outside of Europe is complicated.
The answer, it seemed, lay in R4 regulations penned in the summer of 2015. The plan was a simple one: a single kit of parts that would – within reason – fit cars across the earth’s four corners. Such a kitfitted car would put the world, at the FIA’S sub-wrc level, on a level playing field and give a common set of technical regulations.
On top of the regions, there’s the desire to go one step further down the pyramid, with R4 aimed as a realistic platform for domestic series. This is up to the local governing bodies, but Spain has already sanctioned an R4 kit-fitted car. And South America – an area that already has experience of homologation specials in the shape of the ‘Maxi’ car, which takes an engine and running gear from one car and fits it to something else. The key to the job is making sure the kit is slotted into the donor car in the right fashion, which is why the local governing body has the final scrutineering and homologating sign-off.
On Fia-headed paper all of that made complete sense. Now, with an Oreca-baked pudding ready, the proof will come in the eating.
The FIA made ORECA the single supplier of R4 kits at the start of the season and since then the firm has been working on its kit for the masses. Through the autumn, ex-subaru World Rally Team driver and Toyota endurance star Stephane Sarrazin has tested the car on both gravel and asphalt.
Arriving at the test north of Gap, in the heart of Monte country, my first sight of R4 comes between the trees heading up a valley with Sarrazin hard on the throttle in third, fourth and fifth. Out of sight, only the noise remains. Back into view; down the ’box, flick of the handbrake and it’s on its way back from where it came.
As a snapshot, it looked efficient and predictable.
“It is a great car,” says Sarrazin. “It’s very reactive and it is efficient on gravel and asphalt.”
Pulling the FIA’S plan together has been the job of Matthieu Bassou, formerly Craig Breen’s engineer at Citroen. Bassou is a man of thoroughly cheerful disposition, but you get the impression that his patience has been tested through the development process. Making one car is stressful enough. But making one that fits, well, what does it fit?
“The kit is designed for anything from a Fiat 500 to a Subaru,” Bassou says. “The parts are all common.”
Now, I’m not the most technically minded of hacks, but even I know a Subaru of any flavour is usually longer than a Fiat 500. Bassou knows where I’m going. “We have four different lengths of propshaft,” he says, “but everything else is common.”
Everything else being the Peugeot-sourced 1600cc turbocharged engine, transmission (differential and driveshafts are commonly sized); suspension cradles and triangles, hub carriers; steering rack; brake discs and calipers, fuel tank and suspension mountings.
That, and a load of guides on fitting that kit into whatever you fancy, is what you get for €108,000 [£95,800].
Once you’ve created your car, you then get your local governing body to homologate it for you and you’re good to go.
“The very first goal of the FIA,” says Bassou, “was to have more cars out of Europe in the regional championship. If you go to Argentina and Mexico, you see there’s only 25 cars in their WRC rounds and that’s not so nice. The FIA wanted to give local drivers the opportunity to build the car locally while following FIA guidelines. For example, the safety in these cars will be the same as in World Rally Cars.
“We have tried to build our test car through the eyes of the tuners who will be selling them to the customers. We have tried to find any difficulties, to understand any problems before they have them. We want to hold the hand of the tuners who buy the kits, we have to make sure we get the first cars right. There are areas of the cars which are free, for example the tuners decide on their own suspension supplier and they have to decide on the interior of the car and the roll cage. But, like I said, we want to work with the people building these cars.”
The concept seems entirely straightforward and this kind of thing would be meat and drink of outfits such as CA1 Sport, One of the primary problems would be hte bewildering array of cars actually available to you; there’s plenty of road-going machinery between the extremities of a Subaru and a Fiat 500.
The key to getting R4 off the ground now is making it simple providing a precedence and making sure the cars get to market. ORECA can’t sell direct to you and I and nor does it want to. The plan is to find professional teams which will buy build and sell the cars themselves. Find a team buying five or so kits and Bassou reckons the economies of scale argument will bring the cost of a complete car down to around €160,000 [£142,000].
The other opening in the market is for local importers.
“If Volvo wanted to go rallying it
would be complicated,” he says, “but now it’s very much more straightforward. They can buy this kit, fit it to one of their cars and they have their own rally team.”
I’ll admit, I’m still a little confused – partly by the concept of Volvo sanctioning a Peugeot-engined rally car. And a bit more by what exactly Sarrazin’s been testing. It’s a debadged, Oreca-liveried mystery. “It’s an Etios,” says Bassou. Ah… He fills in the gaps. “It’s a Toyota that’s sold in India and South America. But that’s the point, it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s really a generic car.”
I’m also slightly confused why you would spend more on a car that’s half-a-second slower per kilometre than a second-hand R5 car?
“We’re not competing against R5,” he says. “We know R5 is quicker, but this is the perfect step from R2 or R3. The engine in our car is €10,000 [£8,900] compared with €40,000 [£35,500] for an R5 engine. The running cost is roughly half for our car at around €35 [£31] per kilometre, it uses 98-octane unleaded pump fuel and it will run for 5000 kilometres without are-prep .”
As I type those words, I do so in full knowledge that it will prompt a flood of calls from R5 teams willing to question those numbers…
So far, the ORECA test car has run for around half that number and it still looks and sounds factory fresh.
Reliability and longevity of the sort Bassou is talking, at the cost he is quoting would make R4 an entirely viable proposition in the Middle East, Asia-pacific, Africa and the Americas also.
You won’t see them in the WRC in Europe though. The FIA has sanctioned their world championship use in Mexico, Argentina and Australia.
In Britain, Bassou confirms discussions have taken place with British Rally Championship officials, but there’s still no decision on whether R4 will get a UK green light. Understandably, folk are keen to stand back and watch for a while.
Bassou says: “We already have two orders, one is from Argentina and the other’s come from Spain, where the governing body has already sanctioned and signed off on R4. I can’t really see the car being used on European WRC rounds before 2020, but for now the focus is outside of Europe. But when the cars are ready [for WRC] then why not make this the car for the Junior World Rally Championship?
“The cars aren’t as quick as R5, they will be simple and straightforward to set-up and, of course, they will give good fourwheel-drive experience. As well as that, we will have stability from one season to the next.
“We are the only ones who make it [the kit], so we know what it’s like and it will stay like this for all the years – there won’t be any performance jokers, which makes it even better for privateers: the car will stay the same in terms of performance and cost.”
ORECA’S targeting sales of 15 kits for the next four years, so it’s not about to take over the world.
Sensing that I may still not be fully convinced, Bassou reaches for the Group N argument.
“Look,” he says, “at countries like Estonia where the Group N Subaru and Mitsubishi cars were so popular. These cars are getting too old now, and what replaces them? There’s a lot of these young guys who want to build their own car, but they can’t.” Or they couldn’t. “And now they can. The R4 car is the only option for these drivers and it’s just those sort of young drivers that we want to bring into this category. As we’ve shown, these cars will be cheaper than R5 cars and they will offer the chance of bridging the gap from a twowheel-drive R2 or R3 rally car.”
What the FIA and ORECA needs now is teams around the world to step forward, embrace the initiative and bring their national governing body along with them.
There’s definitely a market for a sub-r5 four-wheel-drive Group N replacement. I’m just not sure it’s a car costing upwards of £140,000, regardless of the reduced running costs and pump fuel.
This is not an argument that’s new to Bassou.
“The FIA set the pricing structure for the parts,” he says quietly.
I understand the concept. I understand the FIA’S need to be able to take the kit around the world and make sure it works just as well in an Indian Toyota Etios as it would in a British Renault Clio.
The FIA’S concept is laudable and has legs for certain markets, but it’s going to take a reasonable leap of faith, not to mention a common interpretation of FIA regulations from scrutineers from Delhi to Daventry, to get it off the ground.
Mahonen’s struggling to see what’s not to like about R4.
He says: “We have R1 which costs €25,000 [£22,200] and [the] safety [features] is 40 per cent of that cost. R2 – who the hell wants to drive those cars? And then it’s R3, which is €100,000 [£88,700] for a two-wheel-drive Tarmac car! R4 makes sense for the cost.”
Mahonen has already come up against some resistance from current manufacturers.
“They are against R4 because they don’t want you and I to take their car and start to compete against them,” he says. Indeed, the idea of buying an i20 and fitting it with an R4 kit might come across as a bit odd.
“We have to take the manufacturers out of this,” says Mahonen. “It’s not for them. when you buy a car from your local dealer and look at the receipt, it doesn’t say you can’t use your car for motorsport. I’m hopeful that it works, but let’s see. The demand is quite good from the governing bodies to look into this.”
ORECA’S Etios R4 ran as zero car at Rallye du Var last weekend, so it’s up and running in public already. Now we just need folk to grasp the concept of running pretty much whatever they fancy, and national governing bodies to play ball.
Once we get there, I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s taken by the prospect of a four-wheel-drive, 270bhp Fiat 500… ■