It’s a right bugger that, after three seasons, we’ve seen the last of the World Rally Championship on Dave. The show’s presenter, Neil Cole, confirmed as much on Facebook after Rally GB. And a tip of the hat to Motorsport Musings for noticing it.

From further comments on Twitter, it seems that a three-year deal has come to an end, and isn’t being renewed. So fingers crossed the coverage ends up on another channel broadly unchanged – because it’s become something of a gem.

It has proved me delightfully wrong this year. I didn’t expect the coverage on Dave this season to be up to much: extra coverage had been announced for Motors TV, and 2009′s coverage on Dave had been disappointingly celebrity-heavy. But Neil Cole was good enough to comment on that post, and he was right: this season it was no celebrities, more action, and more atmosphere.

Rally Japan was the obvious highlight, with extremely stylish use of manga-inspired graphics and Japanese characters; it put the BBC’s attempts to do something similar for the Japanese Grand Prix to shame.

The introduction of pundits was a welcome move, and by Rally GB, the coverage was absolutely bang on: proper rally coverage, but properly entertaining too.

So where on British TV might the WRC end up in 2011? ITV4 had the rights before Dave, but that was a very bland highlights and voiceover affair. With its live BTCC rights extended for another three years, and an assortment of other motorsport highlights packages, ITV4 does still seem keen on motorsport. But maybe it’s got its plate full.

Channel 4 does the odd bit of motorsport coverage, and indeed had the WRC rights prior to ITV4. Channel 4′s coverage was actually rather excellent at one point: daily highlights fronted by the generous – and entertaining – presenter line-up of Jon Desborough, Robbie Head and Penny Mallory. I doubt we’ll see a return to that though.

The BBC, maybe? After all, Auntie Beeb has covered both the Scottish Rally Championship and Wales Rally GB this year. The Rally GB programme is available to watch here until Sunday. It’s a bit dry, but there’s a lot of stage footage, and some nice interviews.

But crucially, those were on BBC Two Scotland and BBC Two Wales. I can’t see BBC Sport picking up the WRC rights: with Formula 1 and MotoGP already, they’d struggle to justify spending any more of their budget on motorsport.

So it’s all a big unknown for next year. Maybe ITV4 is the best hope. In any case, it’s worth letting WRC commercial rights holders North One Sport know what we want – on Twitter or Facebook. I have.