is it real hard to start watching WRC rallies
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unfortunately, yes (if you are not of the ‘geee sure am i going to pay a fee for watching cars full of advertisements passing by ads and ads placed in the most bizarre positions, only to have the ads-sponsored drone cam for about four seconds’ crowd, that is).
Personally, I walked away from it when it become pay-to-view only, and have ever seen short (4~5 minutes max) recaps of it.
There is some (ads-)company that puts out some recaps on youtube (sawfish? or so) but these are… wait for it … more of an advert, so yeah, ymmv.
Not Sure whether ill— the international iTunes Store scene 
has some replayable material stash available for delayed streaming (a.k.a. downloading), might be worth looking into though.
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itv has 1 hr programs: https://www.itv.com/watch/world-rally-championship-highlights/2a2398/2a2398a0098 but they are probably geoblocked and probably have ads
also last time i saw one of those they were kind of too short to really get into, too much talk and not enough stage start to stage finish on board camera shots.
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Yes!
This drives me up the walls — you can TELL if the producer of such highlight reels has no idea what he is working with or on, because they will spend too much time on crashes, and too little on showing the ebb and flow of the specific series/race/cars. Granted, who doesn’t like flying cars — that’s what Michael Bay is for! But give me a hand to understand where they Hyundai does excel over the Toyota, and explain why. WHY does that tire choice on Saturday morning mean Neville barrelrolls in the afternoon, that’s what we have to grasp as mere mortals.
The art lies in explaining complex things in a manner that the audience can understand the concept, and apply that when they are watching your series the next time.
Granted, that’s no easily done! Endurance Racing also does have a huge problem with that, because when even the well informed commentators sometimes cannot explain the race as it pans out, what does the audience do that have less insight, understand maybe 1% of the ruleset and might be first-time-watchers?
They fall back to a kind of F1-level of understanding, where
Driver X takes two seconds out of Y!
Y overtakes X!
Y has done a 2’15.7
which is nice, but doesn’t tell you a thing.
What we lack is context — we as an audience need to understand when a lead ebbs away, what’s (probably) causing one car going slower, the other going faster — easier said than done, I know! Especially with live commentary, that’s almost an impossible thing to do, because we cannot see what’s happening, and we only know after the fact what went wrong (well, aside from the obvious stuff like wheels falling off the cart, that is clearly understood by everyone).
However, ifnthe commentary team tries to make an educated guess, or just raises the point that at the current rate, a crossover will be happening, i.e. a change of position, it keeps the audience invested — that’s what you should foster, and what keeps the engagement in the race, not on the phone.
This is, by the way, one reason why i like to watch endurance races a second time — when you know the outcome, you can take in all the subcontext, e.g. the winning car in the Rolex 24h going down two laps in the first hour, almost being collected by a spinning GT car and gaining back a lap by the ensuing yellow/wave-around procedure, all over the course of 10 laps!
After doing this a while, i feel like this has trimmed my ability to remember these kind of things and set them into context, i.e. having awareness of who’s lap(s) down and gaining during yellows. Some series differ, i.e. do provide better input than others, e.g. the SuperGT series has developed a good format for listing the last five or six laptimes, gap/distance that goes up/comes down, whereas the FIA WEC has 'dem shiny grafixxx, yet fail to tell the story or catch on when a car goes on a tear through the field.
Alas, wrapping back around to WRC — aside from first hand experience … digitally … of doing some rallies myself, i had to read up on how some races were won/lost, and it remained pretty intransparent tbh. There’s a reason why i stuck with endurance racing for over two decades by now, even though i loved WRC4/its successor on the PS2, did clear most of the story mode on WRC3 (on the X360), dabbled in Seb Loeb’s career mode, and dipped my toes into WRC Evolved (last year).
I just would love to know that someone would put this on some boardroom slide and make a case for 'guess what! If you care to make your product available to viewers instead of being greedy bastards, the audience will spread the word and draw in other people, because they will buy games to participate, to understand what drivers experience, take away some lessons learned/1st hand experience, share those with others and together elevate the experience of your product, because they stay invested in it and bring in the new audience/next generation of your audience.
…
Sorry, i got carried away somewhere in this post 
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life-sized vacuformed r/c car grandma got at the mall when you asked for a tamiya
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why does it have so many mystery holes
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for reaching in and doing a quick timing belt change, imo
Oh wait nm
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easy for an fsb guy to shove a makarov through and pierce your vital areas
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thanks for explaining why the old WRC coverage was 1000x better, hell if you watch coverage of more regional stuff from the 90s of like irish and peruvian rally and shit done by random anglo motorsports channels it’s so much better than today still
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EK9 is the most friend-shaped car of all time.
Wait did I post this already?
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My wife and I went drive around the extremely rich republicans neighborhood to look at xmas lights, as is tradition, a couple days ago, and we passed a pair of EK9s with their headlights off that had been entirely wrapped in working string xmas lights.
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I think I want to wrap my Miata in Marlboro livery. Except I’ll use Morley instead.
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Nissan 126X concept
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Ouch, that hits home:
Actually remembering the race in Portland that is mentioned in this article, iirc that was even somehow involving changing weather-conditions, and a stellar drive from De Ferran, of course
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