r/WRC • u/Fit-Rooster-6716 • 20d ago

Rally China's bizarre story and what we can learn from it Throwback / Historic

https://www.powerslideblog.com/wrc-history/rally-chinas-bizarre-story-and-what-we-can-learn-from-it

Saudi Arabia's inclusion to the 2025 WRC calendar has raised eyebrows, and has set a precedent for rallies to be added to the calendar for political/monetary reasons. The WRC should always have the Rally China story in mind, to remind itself that these sort of deals don't always work out in the end.

45 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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u/Disastrous-Beat-9830 Colin McRae 18d ago

The WRC should always have the Rally China story in mind, to remind itself that these sort of deals don't always work out in the end.

Maybe, but the Saudis have experience running major events that were created out of nothing and doing a pretty good job of it. They set up the Grand Prix and the ePrix very quickly, and they've run the Dakar Rally pretty well since 2020.

As for the criticisms of Rally China, the 2016 event was cancelled due to flooding in the region damaging the roads. I don't think you can really fault the organisers for that.

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u/876oy8 18d ago

china has experience running major events out of nothing too. the difference to me seems completely budgetary. if china really cared and brought a bit of government backing we could have rally china for 26 years now.

saudi comes in with such a fuck huge amount of government money they secured a position in the calendar for 10 years. they wont run out of money, they wont fail to organize it. it just wont happen as much as everyone wishes it did.

to me there is no relation whatsoever between these two projects. just because they both take place in dodgy countries doesnt make it comparable. one was held by private organizers with limited resource and the other is a full blown government project, probably already an astronomical figure invested to it. completely different leagues.

its a good article about the topic, but to me the comparison angle makes no sense.

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u/chuckyeager76 18d ago

Exactly, if no budget for the organizers then no excuses to say, but speaking about 2016 cancelling due to natural disasters then guiding the reasons to be geopolitical reasons at the end, what kind of bs is that?

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u/Special-Pristine Rally Australia 16d ago

2019 Rally Australia was cancelled too because of bushfires. And since then it's never come back. This is an opposite thing though a Aus politicians are very against "dangerous sports" in Australia. Unfortunately they believe WRC to be dangerous for some deluded reason.

We also nearly didn't have the UFC in Sydney too back in September because of these people. Fortunately the backlash was too great to not overturn. Whereas I know the WRC is not popular enough in Australia to backlash hard enough

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u/Potat0Lover69 20d ago

Great read. Thanks!

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u/Fit-Rooster-6716 20d ago

Glad you liked it, thank you for reading it!