Citroën Xsara WRC driver Colin McRae has chided the world rally governing body for trying to complicate teams’ driver selections and taking the excitement out of the sport with the new points system.
Citroën Xsara WRC driver Colin McRae has chided the world rally governing body for trying to complicate teams’ driver selections and taking the excitement out of the sport with the new points system.
CARtoday.com reported on Wednesday that the World Rally Championship Commission had recommended that the FIA World Council restrict works teams to a maximum of two drivers who have recently finished in the top three on a World Championship event.
All three of Citroen’s drivers (McRae, Carlos Sainz and Sébastien Loeb) have finished in the top three this year. If the vastly-experienced McRae – the only one of the trio who has not won a rally so far this year – had contributed the least points to Citroën by the end of the season, would that mean the Scot would be out in the cold?
“I don’t think there’s a major problem (with the current rule). The problem was Peugeot putting specialist drivers in for certain rallies,” said McRae, referring to the French concern’s strategy of switching its third car between Gilles Panizzi and Harri Rovanpera.
“The way to stop that was to say you nominate three drivers at the start of the year. They (the FIA officials) always go and over-complicate things and it backfires on them. If I was a team manager, I wouldn’t want to pick around that situation (the new drivers rule)”.
McRae further suggested that the new F1-style points-scoring rules made it less likely that World Championship rallies would be hotly contested from start to finish. He believes that reducing the difference between first and second places from four points to two is encouraging drivers to aim for finishes rather than wins.
“You do lose out on last-day battles, because of it, because, ‘I’ll settle for second and take eight points, there’s no point in risking everything for two points’. That’s basically the attitude and that’s the sensible approach. That’s why the points system’s wrong,” he said.
However, the Scot saluted Richard Burns’s successful exploitation of the new rules. The Briton holds the lead in the championship despite the fact that he hasn’t won a rally this season – Peugeot team-mate Marcus Gronholm, in contrast, has won three and is lying second.
“Burns is using the points system to his benefit and there’s absolutely no wrong in that, but I still don’t believe it’s the right way to do it,” McRae added.