‘More events is not better’: Why the WRC calendar won’t be expanding for the sake of it

The World Rally Championship (WRC) has taken longer than most motorsport series to get its calendar back to where it was before Covid.

The decimated 2020 season featured just seven events, which was half of the previous year, and it won’t be until the 2025 campaign that WRC contests a 14-race championship again.

Formula One, seemingly intent on stretching its schedule to the limit, managed to hold more races in 2021 than the pre-Covid 2019 season. MotoGP achieved the same feat just one year later.

A fairer comparison would be the World Endurance Championship (WEC), which held eight events in its last full season before the pandemic, a number which it has only matched again this year. This highlights the different challenges facing series which don’t have the same financial might as the likes of Formula One.

WRC has been opting for considered growth over expansion at all costs. As part of that strategy, events are first introduced on the secondary European Rally Championship (ERC) schedule before being promoted to the WRC calendar.

This process was used for recently added events in Latvia and Poland, which stepped up to the premier championship this season. For balance, though, it should be noted that one destination fast-tracked onto the calendar was Saudi Arabia, whose ten-year hosting deal announced in June suggested that the opportunity presented by the region was too great to ignore.

It’s also important to consider that the country already has ties to rallying through hosting the Dakar Rally since 2020.

Even with its return to the Middle East now confirmed, WRC has not pursued expansion with wanton abandon. To find out more about the series’ host selection process and its plans for the future, BlackBook Motorsport sat down with event director Simon Larkin.

Let’s start with Saudi Arabia. It’s an unprecedented ten-year deal starting from next season. Will this become a marquee event for WRC?

Yes…I think we’re going to create something really special there. Inevitably, people will say we’re just going there for the money. The fact is I’ve spent a lot of time out there on the roads and looking at the environment that we’re going to be able to compete in.

If we talk about our calendar as 14 very distinct chapters in the book of our season, I know we’re going to create three very different rallies in one in Saudi [Arabia]. We’re going to have a day of some of the most amazing mountain roads I’ve ever seen – whoever made the roads to service the high tension power lines is an unrecognised rally driver.

Then we’ll do a day just outside Jeddah, there’s an area [of] thousands of square kilometres of black volcanic rock. And then we’ll do a day of pretend dune racing – we’ll be on formed roads but, to the untrained eye, it will look like we’re doing desert racing.

Also what we’d love to do is do a night stage, the sun sets almost uniquely at eight o’clock all the time [in Saudi Arabia]. Just like we do in Sweden…it’s the cars with their additional lights on and we’ll be able to do that with a desert landscape. I think we’ll be able to show off the different characters of Saudi [Arabia].

That’s not the only new race next season. Paraguay will become the 36th host country in WRC history – what does it mean to secure a second event in South America?

Rally Paraguay will be based in Encarnación. There’s a bridge that goes across the Paraná River to Posadas, which is Argentina, and it is a city that’s ten times bigger. So we’re going to Paraguay, but there’s Uruguay, Argentina [and] Brazil right there on that corner. We can make a fairly significant regional event there.

Rally Argentina [held between 1980 and 2019] used to get between 600,000 and 700,000 fans. I do think we’ll get significant crowds in Paraguay and, if anything, safety and managing them is our biggest challenge [rather than] attracting the fans there.

We think they deserve it, they’ve worked really hard for it. President [Santiago] Peña got right on board with it and there’s nothing better than having the president pitching to you as to why we should come to his country.

You’re also returning to Spain with the Rally Islas Canarias. What role does the ERC play in preparing events for WRC?

It’s taken a lot of investment from us, but we did want to have this situation where we could enter into multi-year commitments with governments of events in [ERC] territories. [This is] so that they invest over a two-year period and in the third year they get WRC and we get improved ERC events.

That’s what we’ve done with Latvia this year. That was one of the best events that’s joined. The level that they were at was a level that many events would never have been to, and I think we’ll see that in the Canary Islands.

[The Canary Islands] also offered us the opportunity to bring another tarmac event in. We do want to correct that balance [of surfaces] a bit. [Moving forward] I want to have one slot per year of an ERC event coming up and down.

With Latvia, Poland, and Croatia all dropping off the calendar, what does this say about WRC’s global ambitions?

If we tick the US off in 2026, we’ll be in six continents, which is more than any other championship – more than Formula One and they have 24 events. For us to be able to do it in 14 is definitely a significant step.

To keep and attract manufacturers, which is a critical part of our business model, then they want to know what the world championship goes to and what markets it goes to. The US is our missing piece.

Let’s talk about the US then – how likely is it that we’ll see that rally in 2026?

It will happen. We have a great relationship with Tennessee, with Chattanooga, with Nashville, and there is significant support coming from there.

The US is not like other markets where there is any government that will be willing to underwrite an event to the extent…that we require in other parts of the world, it’s never going to happen.

It did take a while for us to convince our board of that, but now they’re onboard, so we know we’re going to have to refinance it. We’re already a long way down the road with a naming rights partner, which takes away from some of our underwriting.

Even if it’s not a profit maker, if it’s washing its face, brilliant. It’s no different to what Formula One had to do. Miami is a joint venture, the confidence they got from a joint venture, which is how we’re running in the US with a promoter, gave them the confidence to back themselves for Las Vegas. I think that’s probably the level we’ll get to.

Are there any other potential options for 2026? Rally Ireland was close to an agreement for 2025.

I’m hoping it’s going to happen. I was in Killarney ten days ago meeting with the government. They’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to tick that box.

We’re doing a three-event economic impact study, which we did in Poland [and] Latvia, and we’ll do it [at the] Central Europe rally in October. Already, the numbers that have come from Poland and Latvia, in terms of the [percentage of] international visitors and their impact have surprised even me.

I’m very confident we’ll get there. The amount of money that we’re looking for [from Ireland], we can more than justify through our economic impact.

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You’ve spoken about potential events for 2026, but are there any dream locations that you would want to work towards further in the future?

Asia, 100 per cent. China, I’ll go to Indonesia later this year, Vietnam – we need another event in Asia.

It also makes sense just from a logistics [point of view], we send one set of kit over there and it can do two events. Australia and New Zealand remain interesting for us, and they’re probably going to be in our future. I consider them in Asia Pacific, so let’s just say it’s that area.

Is there a perfect calendar length for WRC? It’s currently 14, but that’s still small compared to series like MotoGP and Formula One.

If the right opportunity came along we’d go to 15, but it would have to be the right opportunity. The difference between us and MotoGP and Formula One is our events take a week [so] we can’t do back to backs.

If the right opportunity came along that we could find the right package of support for teams, for us to put into a prize fund we could justify and to offset additional costs, we would do 15. But it’s not a priority for us to expand for the sake of it.

We’re also a company, we’re doing ERC and World Rallycross [World RX]. We have a hectic calendar as it is, we need to be careful we’re not expanding across all our championships over and above.

With things like [over-the-top streaming platform] Rally TV, we don’t like to have overlaps. If we have 14 WRC events, eight ERC events, and we go back up to eight World RX events, there’s only so many weekends a year that we can logistically fit this.

We’re being pragmatic I would say; for us, more events is not better.