Most people will know the first World Rally Championship season was held in 1973, with WRC Promoter being somewhat proud of telling us the 2022 season is the 50th running. Some people will know it was only a championship for car manufacturers at the start and the first official driver’s champion came some 6 years later. Not many will really understand why that was; that there was no interest from the FIA in providing for a driver’s championship in those early days. Why?
Let’s first establish a timeline from 1953, the first year the European Rally Championship ran (as the European Touring Championship). Back then, rallies were run on public roads open to other traffic as the special stage had not been invented yet. Some rallies of that first season, such as the Liège-Roma-Liège and the Italian Sestriere may have looked like pure-speed rallies, but they were still what we may call regularity rallies today even if they encouraged high speeds. Speeding laws and law enforcement back then were not what they appear today. Meanwhile, the Monte-Carlo and RAC Rally of Great Britain were so generous with their itineraries nobody found them a challenge at all, particularly the latter which didn’t have wintertime alpine passes. Over the following decade there would be a quiet split between the wealthy drivers of old who just wanted to tour at leisure, and the drivers who wanted to race. By 1958 the RAC didn’t attract any international entries at all, it was clear that the future of a European rally championship lay in the racing kind, not touring. That rally introduced its classic forest stages in 1960 and never looked back. Perhaps I digress and will pick this up another time.
Fast forward to 1968. On the back of the rise of the works teams dominating rallies, using them to promote their cars as reliable, enduring and fast, the European Championship for Makes was introduced (also called ‘manufacturers’). It consisted of a different calendar to the European Rally Championship for Drivers though this didn’t always keep them separated. The Makes championship attracted entries from Saab, Porsche, Ford, Lancia, Renault, Alpine amongst many others. The idea was to keep them all together, whilst having a separate championship for drivers who could run on a more limited budget. Such a success was the appeal of the Makes, that two years later in 1970 it wanted to leave Europe to go to Africa, and so it became the International Rally Championship for Makes. Or Manufacturers, or Constructors, depending on who was typing or writing about it at the time - something else to be covered in time perhaps. Teams like Lancia had a World Rally Team, not an International Rally Team and so ‘World Championship’ was used somewhat interchangeably. In 1972 it expanded to the USA, now covering three continents and involving American makes.
In 1973, now across three continents, which incidentally is still the basis of what the FIA deem is needed to be called a ‘World’ championship, the IRC-Makes calendar became the World Rally Championship. The rest is history. But before we leave it there, we need to look at that name - as so far, we have been looking at FIA titles.
Who won the first World Rally Championship? Easy, many WRC nerds may say. Alpine-Renault! No, actually - first FIA World Rally Championship, yes.
The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) of Great Britain had been awarding their own World Rally Championship title for some time already before the FIA came round to the idea. It was awarded to the manufacturer whose cars scored highest over 5-7 international rallies in a given year. This included Canada’s Shell 4000 Rally in 1964, so already it exceeded the bounds of FIAs European championship.
The earliest mention to this title I have found is early as 1960 when Citroën and Mercedes-Benz were heading into the final round, the RAC Rally, to decide the winner. I’m unable to answer who won as the three cars from both marques retired and I don’t know which were the qualifying rallies! I can say that Ford won in 1963 and Volvo won it twice in 1964 and 1965. This is still a topic I am actively researching and may contact the RAC before writing a full post. The takeaway here is that manufacturers took pride in this award and wanted to win it and spending a lot in the process. When they did, they bombarded the press with adverts, I can only imagine that showrooms were clad in rally imagery.
One more note, in 1962, a Russian delegation looking to enter their state-owned marques in global motorsport, proposed to the FIA (then CSI) that an FIA sanctioned World Rally Championship for Manufacturers should take place. The commission agreed to look into the idea and, well you know the story of what transpired now.
So: in 1973, we have the FIA World Rally Championship for Manufacturers and the FIA European Rally Championship for Drivers. Simply put, the former was primarily a promotional roadshow for car manufacturers to sell their vehicles, even back in those days. The latter was aimed at fair, equitable sport for the ordinary (wealthy) rallyist. That’s where I will leave this post for now, maybe in my next post we will cover 1973-1979, why there eventually became a WRC Driver’s Championship.
If you subscribe you will find a common theme in my posts is this distinction between promotion and sport that we have discussed. It’ll answer so many questions about why the sport of today looks the way it does.