dr-baker wrote:Says a lot about the popularity and success of the WRC that since the end of April, there has only been two posts in this thread. Whereas for NASCAR, IndyCar, _TCC, etc, there have been many more...
Yup. I can honestly say I do not follow the sport whatsoever anymore. Whereas maybe 10 years ago I was totally invested in it. The golden generation is now a long forgotten era.
Nowadays you have two drivers who can win rallies on merit. Loeb (whenever he decides to show up) and Ogier. Any other winner will have lucked into it. I mean, look, Hirvonen is not a bad driver at all, but he's a bit like Massa - we all know he can do a good rally when he's on form, but, there's no way he's on the same level as Alonso. Ogier is the best full-time driver in WRC, and there is no-one even remotely in the same league as him. Latvala could have been perhaps, but the non-stop crashing, accepting being number two at Ford, appears to have left him permanently psychologically scarred, and unable to fight properly anymore. All the raw pace he had when he was at Stobart VK and his first season at Ford WRT has vanished.
There is no talent left. If you put everyone in the same car, Ogier will win 90% of the time anyway, regardless of whether he is driving a VW, Citroen or Ford. Back at the turn of the century, you had an absolute minimum of five guys who could win rallies on any given day. Makinen, Burns, Kankunnen, Sainz, McRae, Auriol, Gronholm, Panizzi (on sealed surfaces at least, he was one of the best). Now instead, we have people at the level of François Delecour, Armin Schwarz, Harri Rovanperä, etc...they are pretty good drivers, but not world class.
So, yeah, it's basically the Loeb generation all over again, but worse. Because the gulf in talent has just widened even further. I saw Ogier being a boss coming a long way off, but I was hoping some other guys, maybe Mikkelsen, Latvala, Nikara, Novikov, Tänak and Paddon would have matured into top drivers by now and be giving Ogier a hard time. But of those, only Ogier and Latvala have been given top drivers, and Latvala failed to translate his raw pace into results. Except, those guys were not given the kind of time Ogier and Latvala were to develop. Novikov had a crash-happy rookie season and was left for dead. He has matured a lot in his first year with M-Sport and is looking a much better driver now. But imagine if Citroen had kept him on for all the seasons inbetween, where he could have been now? Bizzarely, no-one is giving Nikara a chance, just because he has a small budget, and I think Paddon can only get finance to run in the Asia-Pacific championship rather than the world stage...