ESTONIA’S FIRST WRC ROUND TO OPEN REFRESHED SCHEDULE
New event headlines reworked World Rally Championship roster for the conclusion of 2020
This season’s World Rally Championship will restart in Estonia on September 4 and have a minimum of eight rounds.
The high-speed gravel event, a former European championship counter, is scheduled to get underway 174 days after Rally Mexico was curtailed on March 14 and means 33 countries will have hosted a WRC round.
Rally Turkey remains on its original September 24-27 slot on the restart calendar issued by the FIA last week.
It needs to move if the Ypres Rally in Belgium is to be included. Otherwise, Rally Italy – on Wales Rally GB’S original October 29-November 1 date – and Rally Japan will complete the truncated schedule.
But with question marks remaining over Japan, Motorsport News understands teams are already lobbying the Turkish organisers to run their rally a week earlier than planned.
That would allow Ypres to slot in on October 2-4 and maintain the eight-event plan should Japan be axed.
July 2 will go down in history as the day Estonia became the 33rd country to be handed the honour of hosting a round of the World Rally Championship.
In the excitement, social distancing was forgotten as handshakes – minus face masks – signalled the culmination of a decade of hard graft.
At Stenbock House, the building in capital city Tallinn where Estonian prime minister Juri Ratas does his big deals, the country’s biggest motorsport agreement was made public.
With promises that the Covid19 measures missing from last week’s press conference, they will take centre stage when Rally Estonia runs out of the eastern university city of Tartu from 4-6 September. The event organising team, led by EX-WRC driver Urmo Aava, Tarmo Hobe and Silver Kutt, could be forgiven for this health and safety oversight.
They are the three people who got this event off the ground with government support, earned European Rally Championship event of the year status at their first attempt in 2014, then showed rallying’s top teams and WRC bosses how things could be done.
Aava, the event’s figurehead, had always harboured WRC ambitions. Following the rally’s three-year ERC stint in
2016, he took the event off the international calendar to focus on achieving his dream.
After securing factory entries from Citroen, Hyundai and
Toyota for 2018, the event secured official WRC Promotional Event status for 2019. With Ott Tanak winning the world title that season, prospects of a WRC round increased.
Then a dispute with Estonia’s governing body, the Estonian Autosport Union, over a 5000% hike in permit fee charges, led to the axing of what was set to be a second WRC Promotional Event from July 24-26.
But with WRC Promoter in need of rallies due to corona virus enforced cancellations, Aava and his team and the EAU patched up their differences and have achieved what had been unthinkable just a few months ago.
The WRC gets a Rally Finlandstyle event after all that’s just as well run and promoted as the real thing and Aava, Hobe and Kutt will get the recognition they richly deserve.
Although last week’s World Rally Championship calendar announcement confirmed that all remaining events would be open to WRC 2 and WRC 3 crews, it stopped short of revealing the make-up of this season’s Junior WRC.
On hold since Rally Sweden in February, M-sport Poland, the company behind the series, is still aiming to secure a fiveround calendar to round off the 2020 campaign.
It is understood events in Estonia, Germany or Ypres, plus Sardinia will form part of the calendar, while Rally Liepaja – which had been in line to host upgrade from a European to a World Rally Championship event – remains a possibility.
Britons Jon Armstrong, Ruairi Bell and Catie Munnings are registered for the JWRC.