r/WRC

WRT Rally1 Spain by RMC-RFEDA just held a press conference at Rally Islas Canarias. A few things I was able to catch:

• They will have a development driver and 2 other full-time drivers in 2027 and 2028
• They are currently working with a brand in Rally2 to supply the engines, but it can't be announced yet
• Javier Ciabattari will be the technical director
• Julian Pedrafita will be an external advisor
• The car may not be based on a road car (wasn't too clear)
• The first test is expected to be around October

Hi all,

Quick question do you guys now if we will have new episodes of More Than Machine this year ?

Confirmed!

I enter the code from my email to log in and when it redirects me the page doesn't load and just says "Not Found"

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The WRC is going to be gutted by venture capital ghouls unless someone builds a sovereign trust around it **RIGHT NOW**. Here's how to do it for $500 million and why the "Southern USA" bid is already bleeding from an **Open-Access Exploit** wound.

Let me tell you what is actually happening here, because few in this community are framing it correctly, and it's going to cost us the sport we love.

The WRC is for sale. Red Bull and their German investment partner KW25 want out of their promoter deal, which still theoretically has years left on it. The FIA, under Mohammed Ben Sulayem, is running a tender process, and the number being floated in financial press is somewhere in the neighborhood of £500 million for the commercial rights. EQT, a Swedish private equity firm that is absolutely not a rally organization, has been sniffing around. So have other "investment houses," as Malcolm Wilson himself described them in January, noting that most of them were looking at a five-to-seven year exit window. Wilson said this as a warning. Most people in this community heard it as background noise.

That five-to-seven year exit window is the entire ballgame. That is the tell. When a PE firm buys a sports property, they do not buy it because they love it. They buy it because they believe they can extract latent value faster than the underlying asset decays. They will optimize for TV licensing revenue, cut operational costs on the ground, raise hospitality fees, monetize the digital archive, maybe spin up some kind of streaming deal, and then, right around year five or six when the fanbase has been sufficiently milked and the manufacturers are grumbling about cost structures that got quietly inflated, they flip it to the next buyer at a markup and walk away. The sport itself is incidental to this transaction. It always is. This is not cynicism. This is just how leveraged buyout math works, and anyone telling you different is either naive or selling you something.

So here is my thesis, and I want to be clear that this is a genuine structural proposal and not fan fiction: what the WRC needs is not a better PE firm. It needs a Sovereign Trust structure that permanently removes the top flight from the pump-and-dump cycle. Lock it in a non-extractable governance vehicle, the way certain national heritage properties get locked, where the underlying asset cannot be sold for profit, only stewarded. Think of it as the Vatican of Rally. The Vatican does not do five-year exit windows. The Vatican has been running the same playbook for centuries, and that is precisely why it still has moral authority. You do not mess with something that has accumulated that level of sacred weight.

Call it what it is: Rally1 Elite, locked. No technical regulation changes for ten years minimum. The hybrid system stays or goes based on a manufacturer vote, and once that vote is cast, it is frozen. The engines stay loud. The cars stay brutal and fast and physically demanding to drive. No more "milk-sopping" the regulations every three years to chase some theoretical new audience that never actually materializes. The audience that exists, the one that stands on a gravel hairpin in Portugal at 7 AM in the rain to watch Neuville, comes through sideways, and that audience is not going anywhere. They are the religion. Stop trying to convert them into something more palatable for a boardroom deck.

This is what I am calling The Sovereign Split, and it has two distinct halves that need to operate almost completely independently of each other.

### The First Half: Rally1 Elite (The Vatican)

It runs on tradition and terror. Fourteen rounds, maybe fifteen. The established venues stay established because they are established for a reason, which is that the stages are genuinely extraordinary and have been refined over decades. You do not discard Safari Rally or Monte Carlo or Finland because a consultant told you the TV demographics skew old. Old people with money who are fanatically devoted to your product are the most valuable audience in sports, and anyone who has ever watched a Six Nations weekend at a pub in Wales already knows this. The Trust structure means no single corporate entity can acquire controlling interest, ever. Manufacturer commitments get locked in through ten-year homologation cycles that are genuinely ten years, not ten years with asterisks. The whole point of the Trust is that it removes optionality for the extractors. There is nothing to extract. The asset is sovereign.

### The Second Half: WRC-Next (Coachella in a Holler)

An open class. It's not a junior series, not a feeder series, not a consolation bracket. A genuinely experimental motorsport class with an open technical rulebook inside defined safety parameters, run on private land, and operated on a near-free ticketing model.

Here is the technical vision: **mandatory four-wheel steering.** This is not a gimmick. Four-wheel steering on a rally car fundamentally transforms what is possible through a tight hairpin on gravel. The geometry you can achieve, the rotation speed, the exit angle, it is a different physics problem entirely, and the solution looks like nothing currently on the WRC stage. Pair that with **active aerodynamics**—not passive wings tuned in a wind tunnel, but genuinely active aero that adjusts in real time based on speed and surface feedback—and you have a car that can do things on a gravel road that will make people question whether what they are watching is real. Let the manufacturers, or independent constructors, or university engineering programs, or whoever, develop within the safety box.

### The "Open-Access Exploit" and the Private Land Mandate

The venue model is the crucial part that nobody is talking about. The biggest structural vulnerability of any public-land rally in the American South is the **Open-Access Exploit**. I am going to explain this plainly for anyone who has not spent time thinking about spectator management in high-speed motorsport.

When you run stages on public forest roads or public lands, you are legally and practically constrained in how you control access. A determined, reckless spectator who wants to stand in a dangerous location and has the physical ability to access that location—which in Tennessee or Kentucky gravel rally country means basically anyone with boots and a four-wheel drive—can do so. The current model involves course cars, marshals, and red flag protocols. **The red flag protocol is the Open-Access Exploit.** One person in a dangerous position stops the entire stage. This is not a crowd management system; it is a crowd management vulnerability. Anyone serious about running a high-speed rally in the rural American South at scale needs to understand that this vulnerability is not hypothetical. It has already manifested in test events and it will manifest at any large-scale event run on public land.

The Southern USA bid centered on Chattanooga and the Tennessee/Kentucky corridor is an interesting proposition on paper. The terrain is genuinely world-class. The spectator culture in Appalachia, the car culture, the relationship between rural communities and motorsport, it is all there. But the bid is struggling precisely because the public-land model is irreparably exposed to the **Open-Access Exploit**. You cannot solve this problem with more marshals. You solve it by moving to private land.

Private land changes everything. On private land, you control the perimeter. The trooper presence is SEC Football/Daytona 500 perimeter management: hard boundaries, credentialed access, defined spectator zones that are enforced with actual authority rather than orange tape, and a volunteer in a yellow vest. No **Open-Access Exploit** can red flag your stage because the access is no longer open. The perimeter is real. This is not more expensive than public-land management when you factor in the cost of the operational disruption and reputational damage a single major red flag incident causes at a flagship American WRC event.

The ticketing model for WRC-Next on private land should be aggressively near-free. The goal is a price point low enough that the decision to attend is frictionless. Call it fifteen dollars per car for a full weekend. The revenue model is not the gate; it is the camping, the food vendors, the merchandise, and critically the media rights to a class of motorsport that looks unlike anything else currently being broadcast. You use the audience at the perimeter to build the media product that you then monetize globally.

### The Dynastic Dimension

The sport is handing us something almost mythologically perfect right now.

**Eliott Delecour** is the son of François Delecour. That lineage is load-bearing for the narrative. François—the Consigliere of whatever new WRC structure gets built—watching his son compete in the same championship is the kind of story that no amount of marketing budget can manufacture.

**Oliver Solberg** is the other half of this equation. The son of Petter Solberg, Oliver is right now, in April 2026, one of the most genuinely compelling performers in the championship at 24 years old. He is already carrying the weight of a dynasty with effortless competence.

You put Solberg and Eliott Delecour in WRC-Next, give them cars with four-wheel steering and active aero, put them on private land in Appalachia, stream it globally, and you have created high-variance outcomes that generate the kind of organic social media moment that you cannot buy.

The $500 million number is real and it is achievable. The Trust model does not require a single buyer. It can be capitalized by a consortium of rally-adjacent manufacturers, media companies, and individual high-net-worth actors who understand that a locked sovereign trust is a stable long-term asset.

The FIA wants a promoter with a long-term vision. Malcolm Wilson said this explicitly. What Wilson is describing is a sovereignty problem. The WRC needs a promoter whose incentive structure is permanently aligned with the sport's long-term health.

That is a Trust. That is the Sovereign Split. Rally1 Elite locked in the Vatican, WRC-Next burning on private hillsides in Tennessee with Eliott Delecour rotating a four-wheel-steering car through a hairpin that would not be navigable in any other vehicle, and the **Open-Access Exploit** permanently patched by a hard private perimeter.

The Venture Capitalist Ghouls will tell you they have a plan for growth. The plan is always the same and it ends with a liquidation event the sport never recovers from. The alternative is sovereignty.

Someone build this. I'm serious.

**edit:** yes I know the FIA regulatory framework makes some of this legally complex. that's what lawyers are for. the structural logic stands independent of the implementation friction.

**edit 2:** for the people asking, no I don't have $500 million. I have a strong opinion and a working knowledge of trust structures. these are not the same thing but one of them might be useful to someone who does have $500 million.

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New Dirtfish video with some very interesting insights from ex and current drivers and teams.

An ex F1 team boss interested in buying the Promoter? We'll have to see who will be the buy

Fun fact, I did not know David Richards owned the WRC from 2000 - 2007, that surprised me.

What do you guys think?

Good news for the wrc27 regulations, RMC Motorsport will present a wrc27 car on thursday at Rally Islas Canarias.