The Vaucher Analytics State of Motorsport 2025: The WRC
This article is the third in a series looking at the state of several major motorsport organizations:
At the beginning of the 2025 WRC season, my pick to win it all was Kalle Rovanperä. It was a somewhat boring choice, but it seemed to be the consensus one; Rovanperä had only raced part-time in 2024 after having won the two previous championships, so clearly he would be the one to beat now that he had asked for a full-time seat again.
It says something about how spoiled rally fans were for story lines that not only did Rovanperä not win, but he actually announced his retirement from rallying to pursue a long-term ambition outside the sport, beginning with Super GT in Japan and ultimately targeting a path toward Formula 1 through Toyota (for whom he competed in the WRC and which just signed a title sponsorship agreement with the Haas F1 team).
And if that weren’t enough, the title came down to literally fractions of a second on the final stage, and was won for the 9th time by Sébastien Ogier, who, despite his prior achievements, seemed like a long shot at the beginning of the season because he himself only intended to participate on a part-time basis!
On top of that, the 2025 season saw 2019 champion Ott Tanak also retire from the sport, Oliver Solberg (son of 2003 WRC champion Petter Solberg) get called up from the WRC2 division to a Toyota Rally1 car in the Estonia Rally, and win in his debut before eventually claiming the WRC2 championship later on in the season.
You could hardly script more exciting storylines, and yet, in a world where millions of people could tell you what Lando Norris ate for breakfast last week, all the drama in the WRC went basically unnoticed by everyone except for rally fans, who are inherently hardcore motorsport fans.
That the WRC has reached this point is an indictment not of the sport itself, which has the potential to be one of the most engaging spectator sports on the planet, but rather an indication of a complete lack of imagination relative to its potential.
The most democratic motorsport is almost totally walled off in 2025
The World Rally Championship should be one of the most culturally relevant motorsport properties in the world, and in fact for a time, you could argue it was. During the Group B days of the early to mid-1980’s, thousands upon thousands of people flocked to special stages simply because they could; the action was right there.
It still is (while being much safer for fans), and yet the crowds just aren't there like they used to be, despite rallying’s singular attributes.
No other discipline races at the heart of basically every single one of the world’s terrain types, from the Kenyan plains to the snow banks of Sweden to the Saudi Arabian desert. The WRC is not simply on circuits in those countries, but rather in the very heart of their eco-systems.
No other sport allows fans to stand within meters of the action, and places its drivers in ever-changing conditions, to the point where one could argue that the WRC, not F1, is home to the world’s greatest.
Rallying could truly be for everybody, but you can hardly blame few people for caring, because in the WRC, up is down and down is up: F1, the world’s most exclusively expensive motorsport has thousands of on-ramps in to fandom, many of which come from F1’s own online content, whereas the WRC might as well not exist unless you know it does.
F1 probably could get away with scaling back some of its outreach, but instead it just keeps offering on-ramp after on-ramp, and its deal with Apple in the US will only provide more ways of luring people in to paying packages. The WRC has none of F1’s cultural relevance and yet it believes it can get away with a few minutes of highlights for every day of rallying, and then a paid service for anyone else wanting to watch full events.
This is the core contradiction of rallying in 2025, as it has been for years: on one hand its very nature is to be in the heart of people’s communities, but on the other, the current commercial strategy rests on severely curtailing any access to rallying beyond the communities in which a given rally is taking place.
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In less than 500 words.
The rally format has shortcomings which have not been adressed
F1 has grown tremendously because of its packaging as a real-world soap opera, with every event presented as a digestible episode. The very format of rallying, with drivers navigating stages individually against the clock, means that full events stretch on for days.
Traditional broadcasting simply isn’t built for a sport where the action isn’t continuous or head-to-head. Rallying unfolds over many stages across several days, with time gaps that only make sense once you’ve followed the entire sequence. Even committed fans can struggle to follow the entirety of an event as it unfolds, and newcomers have almost no chance, because why would they devote so much time to something with which they are unfamiliar? They might dip in for 20 minutes, see fragmented information, and leave without any sense of who’s winning or why it matters.
In 2025 there should be technological solutions to overcome this, but it’s unclear to what extent they are being explored.
What’s certain to me is that it is not excusable, for the sake of the sport’s growth, to generate literally minutes of highlights in total for an event. Over a given 4-day rally (including the shakedown), the WRC will produce roughly 20 minutes of highlights, which is as much as F1 creates for a two-hour race. In 2026 and beyond, building up freely accessible content from the WRC itself (and then later on its teams and drivers) will be foundational for bringing in new fans.
Another “on-ramp” to motorsports is simracing, and with simracing growing in popularity, a quality, accessible rallying game is essential for bringing new fans in; it’s telling that the most popular title, Richard Burns Rally is over 20 years old.
There have of course been many others released since then, and 2025 brought the unlicensed Assetto Corsa Rally, which was welcomed with excellent reviews. However, uncertainty looms over the officially licensed titles, as EA relinquished the rights back to previous owner Nacon:
Can the quality of the resulting 2027 title be where it needs to be?
What will Nacon do for marketing that the juggernaut EA could not?
Will the WRC do as as much as it can to not only get it into new players’ hands, but also encourage them to follow that up by watching a real rally?
The only big changes coming have the potential to unsettle the sport even more
The 2027 technical regulations reflect an attempt to reset direction, notably by reducing costs and making privateer participation more viable.
These are indeed worthy goals, but regulations alone do not create momentum; fans and manufacturers need to understand what the next era means and why they should care. The paradigm at the moment feels like the NBA agreeing on the rules of basketball when everyone really wants to play football.
This lack of manufacturer and fan appeal at a time when crowds at other motorsport events are at an all-time high is especially baffling when you consider not only how exciting rally is as a sport, but how culturally aligned rallying is with modern consumer identity.
While F1 caters to a luxury-focused global audience, the WRC is fundamentally tied to the outdoor, capability-driven demographic that actually buys cars like the ones they see on the special stages.
Subaru owners are, whether they realize it or not, demographically and emotionally, pre-installed rally fans (and that’s with good reason if you know some rallying history!).
Toyota and Hyundai sell adventure-oriented products to millions of people. The connection is obvious, rallying should be a marketer’s dream.
And yet, instead of building on that foundation, the WRC has allowed its audience to calcify into a hardcore niche.
The “own goals” continue because on top of rallying’s sporting appeal and its obvious outdoor connection, rallying may have the best calendar in motorsport but the most obvious market for rallying is the one missing from the calendar: the United States.
A U.S. event wouldn’t just be a rally; it would be a motorsport festival, and rallying definitely needs a “festival” moment.
Can you imagine what a rallying event on the scale of an F1 race would look like? Imagine Burning Man meets Chamonix meets the pages of an outdoor catalogue come to life.
Indeed, the potential for rally to be everything that other series say they are is right there.
For instance, rallying could be the standard-bearer for sustainability, partnering with host locations on various eco-tourism initiatives.
It could emphasize the fact that the events have no lasting impacts on the environments in which it operates.
It could quantify just how much revenue each event generates for the host community itself rather than a track owner. And let’s remember that rallying is indeed a great equalizer for hosts as well, because in what other series would a country such as Paraguay have the chance to host a major motorsport event and have it go so well, which is exactly what happened at this year’s inaugural rally.
Perhaps it’s because of all these missed opportunities that the FIA has launched a new tender process for the championship’s promotional rights.
Rally Promoter GmbH (owned by Red Bull and German investment firm KW25) is the current rightsholder, but the FIA is now openly soliciting alternatives, with seven years still left in the existing contract, signaling its dissatisfaction with the series’s commercial stagnation.
For the FIA to revisit a contract of that scale mid-cycle is a blunt acknowledgement that the WRC is underperforming relative to its potential.
In other words, even the governing bodies now recognize what fans have felt for years, rallying should be much bigger than it is, and the manufacturers still competing at the top level appear to be down to their last couple of seasons of support.
Where are all the manufacturers in rallying?
The top-level Rally1 category has only three committed manufacturers and if you look behind the curtain a little you’ll realize Toyota is the only big name firmly sticking with the WRC, with M-Sport Ford being more of a privateer operation and Hyundai constantly saying it is close to leaving (perhaps that’s true, their Genesis WEC engine is powered by dual i20 engines from their rally car, so perhaps they developed what they needed and can now move on to a bigger stage).
It is tantalizing to imagine what the WRC could be with a full roster of OEMs. Subaru remains, in my opinion, the great white whale, so unmatched is their brand alignment with rallying. Whether Toyota’s partial ownership of Subaru is a help or a hindrance in a hypothetical return remains unclear, but the opportunity is enormous for the WRC to make a splash (maybe that can happen if the recently unveiled Subaru Performance-B STI Concept is any indication…)
Understandably, any new manufacturer will likely not want to jump in at once, so the WRC’s most powerful asset may be Rally2/WRC2. Indeed, the cars are cheaper, the grids are bigger, and the product is more relatable. Yet the WRC rarely treats WRC2 as a centerpiece, even though it could be the foundation of the sport’s next growth phase.
It will be crucial in 2026 for the WRC to figure out the role that rallying’s second division will play faced with a top-level class whose proposed regulations don’t seem to have manufacturers tripping over themselves to follow.
What does the WRC want to be?
This is what it all comes down to.
Today, we know what rallying looks like, physically: the cars, the stages, the environments.
But really those elements only form the outlines of a single event; what does the WRC actually want to represent and stand for?
I’ve written before that a motorsport series is a business model disguised as a rule book. With that in mind, it follows that for a motorsport series to thrive, it must craft a rule book and associated marketing case that attract manufacturers first and foremost, and fans must at some point be able to associate those values tightly with the series. For instance, F1 is the pinnacle of engineering, MotoGP is for fearless, almost unbelievable racing, and so on and so forth.
If rallying has not ridden the motorsport crest that Drive To Survive started, perhaps a reasonable hypothesis to explain why is that it lacks a simple, clear mission statement.
This would need refining, but it could look something like: “The WRC aims to be the most relevant and accessible motorsport series in the world”.
Everything is there in the message: the WRC has the potential to make the tightest link there can be between its cars rallying (especially in WRC2) and what consumers can buy from the showroom. Fans and future consumers can see these cars in action simply by pitching a tent or lawn chair near a rally stage.
The paradox is that the WRC’s greatest weakness is also its greatest opportunity. Because it has underperformed commercially for so long, the market is wide open. There is room for structural reinvention, narrative reframing, and strategic repositioning.
In a motorsport landscape dominated by series chasing artificial glitz, rallying in the WRC has something no other major series has: it feels real, because it is real.
And at a time when people, especially Gen Z, are apparently craving a return back to authenticity and tactile experiences, that might be the most valuable asset of all.
That’s the most important conclusion from 2025.
The WRC is not failing; it is underserving its potential.
It has the drama, the characters, the landscapes, the heritage, and the natural audience fit.
What it lacks is visibility, accessibility, manufacturer depth, and, most crucially, a clear narrative around its future.
If the WRC and the FIA can adress that last imperative, the others will fall into place, and rallying becomes what it always should have been: the motorsport of the people.
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Image source: Maxime Agnelli via Unsplash