Plans to announce this year’s Wales Rally GB gravel rally route have been postponed, apparently after the FIA rejected the organisers’ proposals for the Power Stage.
The intention had been to run the Power Stage on the asphalt private tourist road around the imposing Great Orme Head promontory, close to Llandudno, and extend the route, using powers under new closed public road legislation, to finish the stage in Llandudno itself.
These proposals required dispensation to the FIA’s rule that Power Stage should comply with standard WRC Sporting Regulations clause 13.3.2 (Characteristics: "This stage shall ... Be representative of the rally") which seem unlikely to be granted.
Rally fans had expected the official route announcement would explain how the new legal powers would provide opportunities to lengthen short forest stages by linking two local stages together.
It is believed that the organisers consider the Great Orme stage to be ‘representative of the rally’ in terms of iconic Welsh landscape, and having been used many previous times on the event.
It is argued that Brenig (the Power Stage forest location used on WRGB last year) was far from a traditional Welsh forest stage.
The FIA has traditionally interpreted the word ‘representative’ to mean ‘of similar type of surface as on the rest of the rally’.
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