Plum

WRC if nothing else makes for spectacular highlights. I haven't followed it much in the past 10 years to say more than that. I respect it a whole lot, but the format is also really difficult to condense into a TV format outside of highlights.

Any motorsport that lets manufactures get too much influence is doomed to become garbage. Car companies do not give a fuck about motorsports in the long term and only swing by to make use of it every now and then, leaving the moment they get bored. They use their influence (see: money) to push for rules that primarily benefit them on the basis of their spending of money, making it hard to impossible for private race teams to compete, and then leave a big 'ol void of nothing in their wake when they all bail. See: The end of Supertouring in BTCC, WTCC 2014, WEC probably more than once now, etc.

I don't know if WRC is going through one of those right now, but the hybrid stuff is a waste of money. IMO, real world development does not happen through motorsports anymore, and if it did that useful info would get locked down under various IP and copyright real fast instead of shared, which is super frustrating when it's about how to make more efficient use of fuel. The whole "we need to make our race cars relevant to our road cars" argument is a sign of Bad Intent and should be rejected at every opportunity.

The ONLY thing I've heard come from F1's entire hybrid era was something about multiple fuel injection pulses during the ignition phase, which sounded really neat. Stuff like that should be immediately put into a whitepaper and spread far and wide, for everyone to use. And, obviously, they probably could have figured that out without putting however many millions into F1 development. They may have originally figured it out outside of F1, I'm not sure.

I will say it's been funny to hear, from a distance, stories of pirelli doing a garbage job in WRC, having been around for their first few years in F1 and making a clownshow of the whole thing. Unfortunately I fear things won't improve until someone gets seriously hurt, because you can't just fuck around with tires in rally racing.