With two rallies down, how is the World Rally Championship looking in 2009?
Predictable, perhaps. But maybe that’s not quite right.
Tarmac is where Sebastien Loeb began his campaign of now complete dominance, and only disaster could have kept him from winning Rally Ireland. So that was predictable. I was surprised by the event’s logo though: every other rally uses the national flag, but Rally Ireland chose a green shamrock on a purple background. Hmm.
Loeb wasn’t supposed to win Rally Norway; snow was supposed to be his weakness. As I said: his dominance is now complete. It was at least a good fight with Mikko Hirvonen. So that wasn’t predictable, but his current lead in the championship certainly is.
What about the coverage on Dave then? Neil Cole continues to present affably, and Paul King’s commentary is becoming ever more relaxed – in a good way. But is it just me, or is there less footage from the stages than last year?
It’s all gone a bit celebrity. The Rally Ireland show gave us Shane Lynch out of Boyzone, but at least he’s tried rallying before, so wasn’t a completely useless guest – just a quite useless guest. We were also treated to brief moments with someone out of Westlife, and Eddie Jordan mercilessly plugging the BBC’s Formula 1 coverage.
But Rally Norway was painful. Dave has commissioned new episodes of Red Dwarf, so to promote it Robert Llewellyn (Kryten) featured heavily – out on the stages, and having an ice driving lesson. He has a good mind, so was at least able to articulate his reaction to the impressive sight of WRC cars driving at speed on snow. But the heavy handed plugging of Red Dwarf was simply bloody annoying.
Dave gets a lot of viewers for its Top Gear repeats, and is clearly trying to apply that show’s formula to the WRC this year. Whether or not that’s the ‘right’ thing to do, it’s not worked yet.
It could work, I suppose, but I can’t help but feel that it’s misguided. Surely it would be better to put the effort into innovating the footage from the stages – since that’s the meat and potatoes of the show – rather than pushing it to the sidelines, and trying to grab general entertainment viewers with incidental features.
Moan over, it’s not terrible. And at least we have the Solberg brothers to keep us amused: Henning in a position to challenge at the front; Petter just glad to be there in any form, doing what he can with an out of date car.
