PM:
Possibly, I don’t know him well enough to say. Realistically, yes you would say it is a year too soon to take on the responsibility. But they said that of Mikko and he turned out to be the ultimate number two driver the world championship has seen for many decades. [Ford boss] Malcolm [Wilson] has got a very, very good way of controlling young drivers. They respect him and he rules with a stiff hand, which is good and it has worked to the ultimate with Mikko and I am sure it could work the same again with Jari.
Crash.net:
Final question, from 2009 the calendar will be cut from 16 events per year to 12. Is that a positive step for the WRC?
PM:
It is a very big positive move. All of a sudden teams are talking about running three cars with junior drivers’ in the third car and so on. Other manufacturers’ are now sniffing around the championship because they are not daunted by this huge logistical problem of 16 rallies and obviously the cost of 16 rallies too. So, yes, it is a massive step forward and it should have been done a long time ago. When it went from 12 to 14 everybody said it was a mistake. Then when they were talking about going back to 12 it actually went the other way and up to 16. That was the biggest mistake the championship made. It has only gone backwards since that move. So let’s get back to 12 again and let’s get common-sense back into the championship and get more manufacturers’ and cars out there.
Crash.net:
Will rotating events actually work though in reality?
PM:
That is a good question. Traditionally if you rest an event for 12 months then the event tends to get, not sloppy, but they are not match fit for the following year. I think the standard of events is in danger of slipping back ever so slightly just because of that. It is a difficult one to do. It all started because all these candidate events came in and paid these huge sums of money to the
FIA to be considered as a candidate event and they all put on these fantastic rallies – and they have been fantastic – and the FIA found themselves in a position where they had to run them. They got themselves in a bit of corner. I am not a big fan of rotation though, I must be honest. I’d rather see twelve rock solid events there and have one event there as a stand-by and just leave it at that. That would be best from my point of view. From a manufacturers’ point of view, putting my
Subaru hat on, there is no point going to Cyprus. I don’t sell too many cars in Jordan either. We should be going to India, China and America – the big, big markets of this world, from a commercial point of view. From a competitors point of view I’d have the whole championship in New Zealand! Everybody has got there little argument to throw into the equation but I don’t know whether it is going to work, but we have got to try it. We have tried 16 events and it hasn’t worked and now we have got to try rotating events. Let’s see how it goes.
