Sebastien Loeb is at a standstill regarding his immediate career plans, following the decision by Peugeot to pull out of next year's World Rallycross Championship.
“I didn’t know this was happening. One or two weeks ago I was sure I would do a full season in WRX and now I have nothing," Loeb said before Rally Catalunya.
"I didn’t think about the future before now. I had the test before this rally and there wasn’t time to think about anything else. I will have time to look next week what is my future.”
Could we see you back in WRC for a full time. “No!”. A limited programme? “Maybe”.
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VW R5 Project Leader Gerard Jan de Jongh. Photo: Martin Holmes
For Volkswagen Motorsport, the newly announced WRC2 Pro championship came late in their planning, says Project leader Gerard Jan de Jongh.
“Very late, actually. I think this summer (2018) we started to hear rumours about it. But at the moment this is not on our plans for 2019. We developed a car for our customers,” he said.
In the days when there was only one WRC2 series, the team “still think that we wouldn't like to be fighting with our customers for the same points in the same championships.
"Of course the WRC2 Pro we wouldn't be fighting for the same thing with our customers. We still don't have any plans to enter a whole championship next year.
"We might appear (with an official team) on one or two events, whether that's in the World championship or in European championship or any other interesting rally championship, but that remains to be decided. But there is no (current) plan.”
Volkswagen have no plans to do the full WRC in 2019. Photo: Luis Camara
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Skoda Motorsport team manager, Pavel Hortek, explained the rationale which led to Jan Kopecky winning the WRC2 championship, even though neither he nor Pontus Tidemand tackled the permitted number of scoring events.
"Skoda never planned to go to Australia (which could have been the drivers’ seventh permitted points scoring event) this year and Jan is a deserved champion at last indeed!”
Regarding the newly announced 2019 WRC2 Pro championship for manufacturers, he added:
“WRC2 Pro seems to be an interesting idea, however, until the clear rules are known we cannot comment on this.”
Regarding the rumour that Skoda had bulldozed the FIA into introducing the new championship, he added:
“The idea and all this activity was coming directly from the FIA, but was pre-discussed with all the manufacturers together,” he said.
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