Last week, Electricpig was in attendance at the World Rally Championship 2011 leg in Finland. Sixty-six drivers hurtled around dirt tracks and country roads as spectators crowded behind low ropes on either side, all eager to catch a glimpse of their heroes flying past.
And that’s the problem – it was the briefest of glimpses. Shouldn’t we expect a bit more in this day and age?
For all the roaring engines and enormous jumps, the rally, as we discovered, is not quite the spectator support you’d imagine it to be.
The various stages of the rally, which takes place over three days, are spread all over the country, and finding a spot to watch is no mean feat. You can’t exactly type “dirt track” into a satnav and expect to be guided straight there, and it doesn’t help that many roads are closed off for use of the rally cars and security cars in between stages. Even brochures with the map of the stages costs a hefty €10.
The length of the course doesn’t make it much of a television sport either, unless you’re happy to settle for edited highlights. Even the fastest driver, Sebastien Loeb, takes two hours and 39 minutes to finish, and he’s flying – it’s obviously not possible to perch cameras at every bend and straight.
But to our surprise, you can’t even count on accurate times mid-way through stages either. Watching the times come in on the WRC’s website, we were puzzled to see some simply not being reported. When we asked, a member of the Ford Abu Dhabi team said that GPS tracking isn’t completely reliable, which is true, especially through towering Finnish woodland – but they also implied that some drivers deliberately turned these off so only their final times were recorded and visible.
In fact, the only way to really stay abreast of what’s happening is to tune into the radio: either local broadcasts, or the (admittedly excellent) World Rally Radio online broadcasts from the WRC.
But think about that for a second: the only way to really “watch” rallying is through the radio. Shouldn’t there be a better solution?
Ford and Peugeot both sponsor one such offering, iRally, an app for iPhone that offers news, videos, stage times and links to World Rally Radio. What happens if you don’t have an iPhone?
You could download the WRC’s own mobile app. It’s free. It’s fast. You can even see where all the racers are along the course in a map overview. Ford even uses this to show team members and journalists back at the garage what’s going on – with a Nokia phone plugged into a flatscreen TV mounted on the wall.
But here’s the problem: it’s a Nokia exclusive. That’s all very well in Finland, the home of Nokia and the only place we’ve ever been where more people can be seen brandishing a Nokia N8 than an iPhone.
But what about everyone else around the world addicted to the sport? Symbian is all but dead: Nokia is canning the platform, sending away the staff who worked on it to an outsourcing firm, and concentrating on its first Windows Phone 7 handset, due out late this year.
Doubtless an exclusive deal with Nokia provided the WRC with a beefy cash lump sum, but it’s not a long term solution for finding new fans, and keeping them in the loop.
Yet even in the heart of the north Finnish countryside, we still had full bars of 3G on our phone. There’s surely a solution here: whether it’s more video broadcast live, or live streams of cameras mounted to the vehicles.
Right now, watching the rally is disturbingly like watching cricket: you wait for hours for a brief buzz of action, and spend the rest of the time glued to the radio (and steadily getting plastered). For a sport where the cars hit speeds that take their leave of the ground, that’s not a flattering comparison.
Back at Ford’s huge headquarters in the service park in Jyvåskylä is the new street Ford Focus, on show for passing fans. It lacks the gaping exhaust and enormous suspension of its rally equivalent, but it’s still full of cutting edge tech, including a system that actually reverse parks for you.
Isn’t it time such a thrilling sport moves to the bleeding edge too?
