How Rally Italy got it wrong

The noise was not one normally associated with the service park. It ranged from the gentle exhaling of breath to a cacophonous crescendo not dissimilar to the audible effect of a cat being strangled.

Snoring.

Sleeping was going on across the service park, in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday. The top of one of the M-Sport trucks had been converted to a dorm containing 28 shut-eyed mechanics.

It was a bizarre sight. And sound.

Not far down the road, there was a similarly strange scene going on. Just south of Monti and west of Olbia, road section complete, the drivers and co-drivers stepped out of their cars and settled down beneath a big olive tree.

For an hour and a half.

The crews would likely spend more time snoozing during the day than in their beds on the nights bookending Saturday. The schedule for last week's Rally Italy was one of the strangest we'd seen in a long time. The feeling in the service park was that this was largely typical of the Italian organisers.

After a decade of criticism of the lack of atmosphere and punters in Olbia, the decision was taken to move the rally base to Alghero. That move worked well; the town on the west side of the island is far more picturesque and packed with character.

The details, however, left a considerable amount to be desired.

M-Sport showed off a new motorhome in Italy, not that many people saw it... © McKlein

Why, for example, was the privateer side of the service park the one given the most prominence? Any beach-bound sunbathers would have passed planet WRC and been moderately impressed with the likes of the Drive DMACK team or Lorenzo Bertelli's Ford Fiesta RRC - but they wouldn't have even seen the monster structures on offer from Volkswagen or Hyundai. Or M-Sport's swish-looking new hospitality area.

Word is the organisers thought they had to maintain the horseshoe shape typical of the manufacturers' section adopted by spacious service parks around the world. No. It's not a regulation, you only have to look at the service in Monte Carlo to realise that. Opportunity missed.

Then there was the waiting time after long liaison sections on Saturday. The event's general manager Antonio Turitto told me this was because of the legal obligation to time road sections at 50km/h (30mph). Was that a new thing?

Again, no. It's not hard to imagine that the drivers won't spend the 76-mile stretch from service to stage at 30mph - they'll drive at the speed limit, which is more than double that for considerable stretches of the journey.

Why not break the liaison loop up with a couple of small stages? And they could be really small, just a handful of miles to break up the monotony. This would also have given the world something to watch, instead of being forced to while away time wandering the service park listening people snoring.

The south-coast town of Cagliari kicked-off the new-look route © McKlein

Thursday night's Cagliari stage is another example of a great idea being badly executed. On an island of 1.6 million people, taking the rally to the centre of a third of that number is never going to be a bad idea. Doing it at nine o'clock at night on the eve of the main event and leaving most with a three-hour journey back up the road after that (I say most, Volkswagen and Citroen took a plane) was not the best plan.

That would have been forgiven if proceedings had rivalled Rally Mexico's Guanajuato start and first stage for atmosphere. The atmosphere was great around the island's capital - a huge improvement on anything Olbia would ever have mustered, but the security and marshalling of the occasion bordered on the shambolic.

Turitto admitted they had been caught with their trousers metaphorically around their ankles.

He says: "When we were first thinking about running the stage in Cagliari, if you had told me we would get 40,000 people coming, I would have said that was crazy. We didn't expect even 10,000 people."

But they came and they came and they kept on coming and pushing and pushing until those at the front were left with nowhere to go but into the road. The stage was stopped. The people pushed back. When they came again, the stage was cancelled. So, some crews drove south and north for six hours for nothing.

No wonder tempers were frayed on Friday. But that was nothing compared with Saturday, when both runs through the 36-mile Monte Lerno stage had to be canned due to a car rolling and another one catching fire.

Some drivers were denied a double-helping of the infamous Micky's Jump © McKlein

At a stroke, 72 miles and the heart of many a privateer's event was ripped out.

Last year, Sardinia was drinking in the last-chance saloon, with WRC oblivion just another poor rally away. The message hit home and 2013 wasn't as bad. A few more people turned out and praise was given for the improvements made 12 months ago - but the progress really wasn't worthy of last week's swagger.

The FIA remains adamant the event's future is on the mainland, but such talk was dismissed by Italians only interested in talking about next year on the island.

The hand of the rulemakers and decision takers has been considerably weakened by the lack of any kind of threat to a Sardinian rally.

In years past there have been rallies queuing up at the door to replace anything other than near perfection, but those events simply don't exist anymore. The global pinch allied to the size of wallet required to play at the WRC table has put the series beyond most countries. Let's hope so. Rather that than events no longer seeing the worth of counting themselves among world rallying's elite...

If Rally Italy doesn't right the wrongs of last week, then there simply is no place for it in the World Rally Championship. None of the above represented a hanging offence, but the combination made for a rally nowhere near the benchmark.

So, next year could be the WRC's final trip to Italy's second biggest island.

Hang on, haven't I heard that before somewhere...