FIA has no appetite to reintroduce a World Touring Car Championship

The FIA and the WTCC’s former promoter, Eurosport Events, have confirmed there’s no interest from manufacturers at present to introduce a high technology World Touring Car Championship, with the customer racing World Touring Car Cup set to remain as the touring car top tier for the immediate future.

The WTCC came to an end at the close of 2017, with the last title won by the Volvo Polestar Cyan Racing team with Thed Björk, before the promoter Eurosport Events teamed up with TCR International Series promoter WSC Group to introduce the WTCR – World Touring Car Cup for 2018.

A 25-car grid in year one has been followed by a slightly expanded 26-car field for 2019, but now with an almost full grid of professional and factory supported drivers, all competing in customer teams with technical and financial support from six manufacturers; Hyundai, Lynk & Co, Honda, Volkswagen, Cupra and Audi.

Prior to the move, the WTCC was mooting a replacement technical regulation to supersede the five-year-old Super 2000 TC1 rules, which would have seen larger, more powerful cars, in-line with the DTM Class One regulations introduced, but manufacturer interest was reportedly minimal.

“There would be space for a high class, but today, I don’t see it coming,” said WTCR promoter Francois Ribeiro.

“Touring cars have been a success when the world championship regulation was global, and that’s the mistake, which I’m part of, we made with TC1. On paper, TC1 is a first-class technical regulation, it was a first-class job from the FIA.

“When you think that on the same grid you can have a Volvo S60, or a Honda Civic hatchback, a Citroën C-Elysée, or a Lada Vesta, and without (Balance of Performance) or waivers, you can bring those cars within a one second window, at a reasonable cost, it was a first-class technical regulation.

“The problem it was too expensive to be used at a national or regional level, and not expensive enough to be perceived as top class, say like DTM cars. If you put a DTM car and a TC1 car on the pit lane, ask any kid which you prefer most, how many would pick the TC1 car? It was not enough ‘wow’ effect. It was too expensive to dream national championships could use that model, so there was no business case for manufacturers for a second-hand market for WTCC cars. That was the mistake we made. We have to learn from this.”

The FIA also confirmed the lack of interest from manufacturers as the reason it made sense to cancel plans to introduce new technical regulations for the World Touring Car Championship, which eventually lead to the partnership with WSC’s TCR concept.

“We cannot multiply world championships, as at a certain stage, you don’t have enough manufacturers to get involved in ten championships,” said FIA Circuit Championships director Frédéric Bertrand.

“The reason why we didn’t launch a higher category in touring cars, is because the return on investment on what we could launch is not something we could sell right now.”

The president of the FIA Touring Car Commission, Alan Gow, added:

“We were looking at doing something, but you can’t do it without the buy-in from the manufacturers to do it. At the moment, there’s no appetite from the manufacturers to embark on that sort of exercise, so for the moment, it’s shelved, until such time, it may be never, we can get that sort of support.

“If we’d introduced it, we’d have had five cars on the grid and it would have been a disaster. You’ve got to be pragmatic about things, and when we realised there wasn’t the interest from the manufacturers to support such an expensive programme, we did the right thing and cancelled it instead of go ahead with it and create a problem for ourselves.”

The WTCR is entering the second year of a two-year deal between championship promoter Eurosport Events and TCR technical regulations owner WSC Group in 2019. TouringCarTimes understands negotiations are continuing in order to extend the agreement even further, but neither party is able to talk about the situation while contractual talks are ongoing.