Is World RallyCross Worth Watching?

What do you do when all of the motorsport one usually watches takes a break for a weekend? This was the question that I found myself asking back in September. Formula 1 was on a two week break, Formula 2, W Series, Nitro RX and Extreme E were on hiatus, Indycar, Formula E and Formula 3 had all wrapped up their respective seasons and WEC and ELMS have massive gaps between their rounds. I was actually (and weirdly) looking forward to a weekend without any motorsport so I could unplug from all of it. And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for Swedish racing driver Klara Andersson having other ideas for me.

Earlier in the week, I’d entered a competition run by Klara and World RX to win a free weekend viewing pass for the fourth and fifth rounds of the World RX Championship in Portugal. Not expecting to win, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the opposite was true come Saturday morning with Klara being the driver to treat me to a new fix of motorsport in my time of need. Yet more proof we all need a Klara Andersson in our lives.

Timmy Hansen of Hansen World RX Team in action at FIA World RX of Montalegre , Portugal on 17th September 2022

Having not watched any World Rallycross before (aside from the odd highlights reel here and there earlier in the 2022 season) and having jumped head first into that breed of motorsport with Nitro RX, I thought it couldn’t hurt to take a look. After all, my appetite for motorsport is quite varied and I’m always open to trying something new. So what did I make of my first experience of World RX and would I recommend it to rookie motorsport fans and other die hard motorsport fans alike?

Thanks to my time covering Nitro RX, the format for the weekend was easy enough to get to grips with. There’s one practice session followed by Superpole, two heat races, a progression race, two semi finals and then the main event itself – the final race. Trust me, it makes more sense when you’re watching it. Each race is only five laps long and every driver must do a ‘Joker’ lap – this is where they must divert from the racetrack for a short amount of time to take a second, slower route around the circuit before rejoining the main body of the track. It’s designed to bring strategy more into play and make the races more exciting. Finally, there’s only ever a maximum of five cars competing against one another per race.

Kevin Hansen (SWE) of the Hansen World RX Team seen during the FIA World Rallycross Championship in Montalegre, Portugal on September 16, 2022.

All of this is pretty standard procedure and coming into the weekend with a fair amount of motorsport knowledge, I had drivers involved in World RX that I knew about so there wouldn’t be too many new names to learn. Klara Andersson was obviously where my bias for the weekend lay in terms of support but seeing the likes of Timmy and Kevin Hansen as well as Johan Kristoffersson in their natural elements was also very interesting too. Others, such as O.C Veiby and Niclas Gronholm I had heard about and seen around before. But despite all this promise and a track that looked like it could be a bit of fun once things got going, the racing over the entire two rounds on both the Saturday and the Sunday left me with a bit of a hollow feeling.

Now I want to be clear, the performances that each driver put on were impressive and one can easily see why the Hansen Brothers and Kristoffersson are seen as some of the best in the world in this genre of motorsport. But to watch, it lacked that wow factor. For such short races, the Joker laps didn’t even add much to it and you could accurately guess the result of most of the races by the end of the first lap. So much so that it made it hard to support other drivers because you knew that as good as they are, they wouldn’t be able to win. Just as you’d get into the groove of a race, it would be over. Despite having a near identical format, this is something that Nitro RX doesn’t suffer from and its inevitable that as both seasons unfold, more comparisons between the two series will be made.

Winner Niclas Groenholm (FIN) of the Construction Equipment Dealer Team, second Ole Christian Veiby (NOR) of the Kristoffersson Motorsport Team and third Klara Andersson (SWE) of the Construction Equipment Dealer Team seen during the FIA World Rallycross Championship in Montalegre, Portugal on September 18, 2022.

Coming into World RX felt like coming into Formula 1 and finding out that Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Valterri Bottas win 9/10 Grand Prix and have done so for the last five years. Which admittedly has mostly been the case. Once in a blue moon, you’d get a Budapest 2021 but you should in no way get used to that. Curiously, dominance by multiple drivers felt worse to watch than it does when it’s just one driver dominating.

Sunday’s action on track was better as we got to see Kevin Hansen really take it to Kristoffersson in the progression race and beat him at his own game. It showed that Johan wasn’t invincible and that maybe someone else would win in the all important final race. My wish did come true but not in the way I wanted. Kristoffersson again took the field by storm but made a controversial move down into the first corner that saw him essentially aggressively shove Timmy Hansen out of the way and down to the back of the field. Coming from F1, any contact at all like that is usually frowned upon by me but having watched all of Extreme E and a lot of Nitro RX, I also know that more this style of racing is accepted in this arena. Even so, when I’ve seen it done it’s been taken up to the limit, not over it and in this instance, Johan took it over the line. After winning the race on track, he was penalized and the win was stripped from him, promoting Niclas Gronholm up into first place to not only finally put a smile on the Finn’s face after he’d looked fairly unhappy all weekend but to also give the Construction Equipment Dealer Team their first double podium of the year as teammate Klara was promoted deservedly into P3 after sensational driving all weekend by the Swede. But this isn’t how you want a race result to be decided – it should be done on track.

It’s also not the first time Johan Kristoffersson has been at the center of a controversial win that was then stripped from him in 2022. Back in July for the third round of Extreme E in Sardinia, Johan made an aggressive move against Carlos Sainz Sr. which resulted in the latter crashing out of the race with serious damage to the car and leaving the Spaniard shaken. Given the length of the course in Extreme E and Johan’s proven skill behind the wheel, the move seemed wholly unnecessary and at the time, a one off. The win in Extreme E was taken away from Johan and I would have thought that someone as experienced, professional and skilled as Johan would have learnt his lesson. Turns out I was wrong. What made it worse though was Johan then calling the final race of the round on Sunday “boring” after the race on social media. He has 53.9K followers on Instagram alone and acting in this way not only puts him out of favor with motorsport fans but it damages the reputation of World RX as he essentially tells people not to watch it.

Yes, we love it when drivers get angry and cause drama – fuelled no doubt in recent years by the overdramatization of motorsport in ‘Drive to Survive’ – but when the driver in question getting angry is doing so because of something that was their fault and not someone else’s, e.g. another driver or a race director, then it doesn’t benefit anyone. Look at Lewis Hamilton as an example of how to be gracious in defeat, even at the most demanding of times and in the heat of the moment. Occasionally you see the red mist descend but it’s not there for long and is soon replaced by pure professionalism – something that was distinctly lacking here.

I was happy that I watched a full weekend of racing of World Rallycross – if for no other reason than to now say with 120% certainty that Klara Andersson will be a star of the future and one to watch and that the Hansen Brothers truly are a force to reckoned with in the off-road world. Would I watch it again? Not at the expense of prioritizing it over F1 or any of the other species of motorsport listed at the top of this piece. But I’d definitely watch the highlights and be interested to discover how the Championship unfolds. With World RX, it comes across as a watered down version of Nitro RX and for an FIA organized global competition, that’s not good.

Some of the downturn in interest in World RX could come from its choice to convert into a fully electric racing series this year. If ture, it’s disappointing from fans but not surprising. However, it can’t be the sole factor for losing old and new fans. Formula E, Extreme E and Nitro RX have all proven that electric motorsport can be epic in all definitions of the word. So perhaps it’s the lack of a fully developed TV program and the minimal action on track that’s the reasoning behind it. Some of the drivers too seem absolutely uninterested in being interviewed and whilst I can sympathize with that, it’s a part of motorsport that can’t be ignored the deeper we get into the 21st Century and neglecting that duty also damages the sport. If the drivers don’t seem interested in it, why should the fans commit their time and money to it?

When the racing was good in World RX, it was good. But that only happened about 20% of the time and despite the incredibly passionate commentator that is Nick Fellows doing an outstanding job all weekend, the enjoyable parts of World RX were not enough to distract me from the bad parts and convert me. I’ll definitely keep an eye at it – but from a distance. For now, that’s what I recommend anyone who’s reading this does too.

Author: Thiemo Albers-Daly