The World Rally Championship Phenomenon
Motor sport is a fantastic branch of modern sport. This of course is only my personal opinion because many people might say how can it be a sport to drive a car or a plane or a boat, but others probably agree with me. Into the fray of motor sports comes a really interesting branch of car racing which has been around for many years. I am talking about rally driving. This motor sport is very popular the world over and it is a very interesting sport to watch and follow.
The first time I watched a rally car racing around the track I was enthralled as to how someone could slide a car around a track that easily. The drivers of these very powerful cars have innate skill in how to turn a car and keep it straight and go so fast that they manage to put in a very quick lap time. What is it about this sport that makes it so interesting because if one thinks about it, it is basically a heavily modified car being flung around at very high speeds around a specific track? Therein lies the beauty of the sport. The facts that people who understand it and follow it are able to keep it as their own and not have other people who don’t understand it try to follow it. It becomes like a sort of special club for those that love this particular brand of motorsport.
The tracks that these cars are flung around on are usually out in the open where some tracks cut through a forest, others are on snow, in the desert and others still on roads. Another very interesting thing about this sport is that a driver has to be able to drive his/her car on all these different and hazardous surfaces. Driving a car on a road is very different to driving it on snow or in the sand. If anyone has ever tried to drive in snow and ice knows that it is a very hard thing to do. Just controlling the car and keeping it straight takes herculean effort. Now imagine driving the car at very high speeds and controlling it to such an extent that it slides through a bend. Anyone who has ever tried to slide a car in the ice through a bend probably crashed his or her car. It is a very difficult thing to do. The principles of driving a rally car are probably the same for all surfaces but as some surfaces are much more slippery than others or some are rougher than others, it takes a lot of skill to adapt to these different driving conditions.
Driver training starts at a young age to try and hone the skills of the driver into adapting to many different surfaces and styles before they turn pro. An interesting fact about this sport is that Sweden produces many world rally champions. It does so because Swedes for some reason have some inbuilt ability to drive well, which a lot of people from many countries also do. But in Sweden this ability is honed and nurtured from an early age. So when the driver grows up and by the time they turn pro there is already a skill and years of training for others to reckon with.
The cars that are driven in the World Rally Championship, or WRC as it is popularly known, are highly engineered and very powerful machines. The manufacturer takes an ordinary car from their line up of production cars and modifies the stuffing out of it. They produce a purpose built rally car at the end of it. The engineers on site that are there to repair any damage to the cars and make sure they are running smoothly, are a very talented bunch of individuals. Everything that can go wrong with a car does go wrong with rally cars, simply because of the very rough conditions they are being driven in. It is the job of the pit crew to repair the car, if anything breaks, in the quickest time possible. Having been to my mechanic who takes three days to change a headlight bulb, these people are highly skilled just like the driver.
The final aspect to talk about is the navigator that sits next to the driver in the rally car. They are usually barking directions to the drivers in an unintelligible language that only the driver and team can understand. It sounds like gibberish to the rest of us. One of the strangest scenes I have ever seen in a rally championship is when a navigator gave the wrong directions to a driver and they both went off a cliff but survived because they got stuck in a tree. I’m sure the gibberish was misread that time!
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