Spectating at a rally is an experience that attacks the senses, bringing to life the speed, sound and excitement of the world’s most exciting form of motorsport.
But picture yourself in the forest waiting for the first WRC car on the re-born WRC-qualifying Rally New Zealand in 2024.
You’ve been waiting for a good hour, having secured the perfect viewing location, when suddenly you remember that you’ve left your camera in the car.
Not wanting to miss capturing reigning World Rally Champion, Kalle Rovanpera, on your new digital camera, you head back to the car to retrieve it.
When you return five or so minutes later, you’re shocked to learn that you’ve not only missed seeing Rovanpera, but the next two cars in the field as well. And you didn’t hear any of them!
Welcome to the World Rally Championship for electric cars …..
While the story above could be a little far-fetched, is it really? Are we that close to seeing electric cars in action in top-level rallying, and if we are, how do the manufacturers make them sound like real rally cars?
It’s clear that electric cars are the way to the future, as witnessed by Volkswagen’s record breaking run up Pikes Peak in June in their electric car, but can they be a success in rallying?
The sport we love takes a different kind of spectator. Rallying doesn’t give you packs of cars together on a circuit, with often minutes between one car and the next in the forest.
As a result, part of the enjoyment is listening for the sound of the next car due, visualising it as the engine note rises and falls through a complex series of corners on the way to your location.
When the car suddenly appears, you have a few seconds to enjoy it, before it disappears into the distance and you’re left with a short wait until the next car does the same thing.
How, and if, this can be replicated with electric cars remains to be seen.
When the only sound an electric rally car makes is the gravel hitting the underside of the car, it provides a new set of challenges for the sport’s rule makers, not the least of which is the safety of spectators.
At a crowded spectator point with lots of eager chatter among rally fans, it’s likely that you won’t hear an electric rally car coming, so will we be left with a series of air horn blasts as the only indication of an approaching vehicle?
If we are, it could quite easily spell the end of spectating as we know it. And without the fans, how do we market the sport? How do we encourage sponsors? How do we make it exciting enough to put on television?
The cars will be fast and spectacular, there’s no doubt about that at all, but will that be enough for diehard rally fans?
These are questions – like the future of electric cars – that we can’t begin to know the answers to, yet they are perhaps even more pressing than who’ll win this year’s WRC, or whether Hayden Paddon has a full time gig in 2019.
The WRC’s recent alignment with Japanese-based Asahi Kasei, a company that completed a jointly developed AKXY electric concept car in 2017, clearly shows that the championship promoters are looking to the future.
Even more recently, and closer to home, Hayden Paddon used an electric Hyundai Kona EV for his recce at Rally Coromandel.
Whether we like it or not, the future, it seems, is closer than many of us would like to acknowledge.
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