DAVID EVANS

“WRC calendar is head versus heart”

Missing any round of the World Rally Championship is a wrench. Always has been. It takes something fairly special to keep me away from the cut and thrust of the finest competition on the planet.

A family holiday to New Zealand and Australia did it. Watching Ott Tanak’s third Rally Germany win on the bounce from afar was difficult, but made slightly easier by a drive along Waipu Gorge Road, just north of Maungaturoto, North Island, NZ.

I’d promised the female side of the family no constant reminiscing of ‘watching Colin Mcrae here’ or ‘seeing Richard Burns do that there’.

I lied.

It’s been seven years since I was in the land of the long white cloud and that’s seven years too many. While much has changed – Paparoa’s brilliantly, er, local coffee ‘shop’ in somebody’s front room (complete with sofa on the lawn) has gone, and taken one of the best flat whites in memory with it – much has stayed the same. Like the roads.

The landscapes. And the rugby.

Waipu Gorge is a classic, sitting at the bottom of towering, fern-filled, banks the road carves its way through a rain forest.

Whaanga Coast, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. Arguably the nation’s most iconic – certainly most picturesque – test, the road clings to the cliffs high above the Tasman and dares you to take just a touch more speed as you surf from camber to camber. Corner to corner.

That done, the best way to relax is with the flat white you missed in Northland in the surf-cool and stunning town of Raglan.

Make no mistake, New Zealand’s still got it.

And, hopefully, it’s going to share it with us for one year only in September next season. That is if the 2,653th incarnation of the 2020 World Rally Championship calendar is to be believed.

This, predictably, would be a good thing for me.

But I can completely understand the head versus heart nature of the WRC Promoter’s consideration over a return to the islands in the South Pacific.

The manufacturers aren’t exactly tripping over themselves to book their tickets to NZ, where a population of 4.7 million (about half that of Greater London) means the new car market isn’t the biggest. The standard Kiwi-defence of that one is to point folk in the direction of Finland, the WRC’S standardbearer in just about every sense, which enjoys a population of 5.5 million.

Let’s not kid ourselves, even with its hideously hiked hotel prices, the logistical costs of rallying around 1000 lakes are way smaller than shipping kit and gear to the world’s far side.

I was, however, hugely encouraged by a recent conversation I had with a senior figure in the WRC Promoter. All too often the service park is ready to lambast the series’ rights-holder for an overly commercial approach (something which, I’ll be honest, never really ceases to amaze me), but this time there was a much softer approach.

“We know about the roads,” said my promoter friend. “We know how good they are and it would be a real shame if this current generation of drivers didn’t have the chance to drive them at least once.”

I couldn’t agree more.