Does the WRC need crashes to matter?

Did you see it? You couldn't really miss it could you? Rally Mexico's never short on drama, but that was taking things a little bit far. It was insane, not to mention risky.

Commitment, bravery and brilliance made those seven minutes of the best television in the World Rally Championship. The shock reaction was just as insightful.

The look from Mads Ostberg and Andreas Mikkelsen said it all. He'd done it again. And then some. Winning a 7.79-mile Powerstage by 5.6 seconds is almost the same as David Rushida lapping somebody in the Olympic 800 Metre final.

That's Sebastien Ogier right now.

Sorry?

Oh, you thought I was talking about Ott Tanak's unscheduled arrival in a Los Mexicanos lake on Friday morning.

No, I was talking about the breathtaking ability of the rally winner.

Hello?

Where have you gone?

BBC. Sky. Are you there?

Ah, how silly of me. Nobody crashed. There was no near-death experience, no danger of drowning.

The pictures and video of Tanak crashing into a lake went viral over the weekend ©WRC.com

All that was on offer this time was the outrageous ability of the best drivers in the world doing what they do every day... that is 100mph through the trees.

Where's the excitement or entertainment in that?

Nobody needs to tell me about the news value of what happened to Tanak last week. It was a genuinely incredible story, straight out of Hollywood with action, drama, emotion and the human interest of Ott's duck. No wonder it went around the world.

It was the same last August, when Thierry Neuville rolled his Hyundai into a vineyard, crushed some grapes and bent some panels. Next thing you knew, our favourite Belgian was being shown on BBC Breakfast. The best bit of the story came three days later when he won the rally.

You wouldn't have known that, were you relying on BBC Breakfast or Sky to follow up the story. They didn't bother. I mean, where's the interest in man wins rally? Even if it did just happen to be the most dramatic Rally Germany ever.

I'm fed up with rallying being picked up and put down by the mainstream, of use only on the front page without getting a look in at the other end of the world's newspapers.

Our cause isn't helped by fat blokes who think they know about cars carping on about how great Group B was and how the current crop of men and machines aren't worth getting out of bed for.

Yes, yes, yes, I know I go on about Quattros and S4s a fair bit (and I'm living in a bit of a glass house when it comes to waistlines), but I'm also wide awake to the here and now. That's the here and now that is around five or six seconds per mile faster than the anything coming out of the eighties' four-year festival of fever.

Footage of a car rolling into a lake is always going to tickle Fleet Street's fancy, but how is it that we weren't able to retain the interest even to cover the car's return to the stages?

Ogier's dominant win and stunning final stage performance flew under the radar © XPB

The easy thing here would be to lay the blame at the door of WRC Promoter; if the promoter was promoting the thing properly, etc, etc. But I'm not sure that's the case this time.

I fear the WRC has fallen so far from the sporting radar that it no longer registers. And until these people wake up and watch what's happening on the stages, nothing's ever going to change.

Tanak's tale was extraordinary (and even won itself the perfect #TiTanak hashtag courtesy of WRC Live's Becs Williams), but what would happen if the roll hadn't come at the end of the clip. The handful of corners before were pretty impressive, right?

If it's speed you need, then let's get back to the start of the story: Ogier and the Powerstage. Go and watch those 6m50.5s, then come back and tell me this sport's not worthy of a place among those other giant pastimes so richly covered by the BBC. You know, bobsleigh racing or riding a bike.

Granted, we're in a period of Ogier domination right now, similar to the nine-year stretch Sebastien Loeb enjoyed when he was at the top of the tree, but isn't that a story in itself? It's easy to slap a 'boring' tag on the thing and let stories slip from the spike to the scrapheap.

Once there, it's tough to find a way back for something that's not mainstream; something that's such a minority pastime as driving a car. It's not like there are more than a billion cars on the road around the world, is it...

Maybe the key here is getting the message across that these boys are doing what they do on roads that you, me and a billion others use everyday (Rally GB excepted, of course). Put it into people's context and it will inevitably find a way into their conscious.

Once it's there, it's up to the people to work out if they're interested in watching a car dance its way from apex to exit via a ditch or two, with barely a lift in top and the steering wheel pointing in the opposite direction to travel.

Those who reported Tanak's crash were less interested in M-Sport's rebuild...

While risking falling off a mountain or into a lake.

At this point the promoter can and must start to make more of a difference. We've got to take rallying to the people, coverage must be more accessible to the masses. Human interest, as we saw with Tanak, is everything.

Ultimately, though, as the WRC took to the skies heading east and back to Europe, it did so with a massive sense of relief.

There were a couple of young Estonians coming with us, living and telling the tale. So easily, much too easily, that might not have been the case.

In the immediate aftermath of the shunt, there was a good deal of understandable anger that it had taken so long to find the crew and that there were no divers on the scene, when the stage went so close to the water. I was one of the angry ones. Which is why I went to find rally director Patrick Suberville, to ask him how he'd let this madness play out.

What I found was a man who shared my concerns. Suberville pointed out that, in years gone by, so low was the water that he reckoned Tanak would have reversed off the shore line and back to the road with little more than four damp Michelins and a broken windscreen.

As for the question of where they'd gone, Suberville held up his hands. "We looked," he said. "We did everything we can do in this situation, we asked the cars at the end of the stage, we checked with the [radio] crews. But they hadn't seen anything."

The car had disappeared. And it had. Looking at some of the pictures, Tanak and co-driver Raigo Molder are getting out of the water and the Ford's nowhere to be seen. In the background, the dust kicked up by the car has yet to settle.

It was that quick.

Suberville said a radio crew was able to narrow the location, but still nothing made sense. With the benefit of hindsight, looking in the lake might have been a good idea.

...despite the best efforts of M-Sport to play up the #TiTanak tag when the car returned

"But the road is straight," he said. "We have never, never had any kind of problem with that section before. It didn't even come to us that he could have gone in there. It didn't make sense."

Suberville acknowledged that the divers at the start weren't best placed, so he moved them into the water - ironically just above Tanak's Fiesta - for the second run of the stage. They'll be back there next year.

None of this helped for the 17 minutes the M-Sport team and the rest of the world sat and waited to find out the fellas' fate. Suberville had located them in 12 minutes, but spent the next few minutes scrambling FIVs and running through a safety procedure to get in and check them out.

But what about the tracking? Hmm, that's a bit of a can of worms to open at this end of the column... Should it work underwater? Yes, of course it should. As somebody in the service park pointed out, it should have the same level of crash-resistance as the black box on an aeroplane. And I agree, 100 per cent.

In an ideal world.

Do you know the cost of developing a rally version of a black box? Nor do I. But it's not going to be cheap. Now, instead of getting all indignant about me putting a price on safety, the best thing to do would be to find a way to fund it.

And the best way to fund it is via a healthy, cash-rich, sponsor-filled series with mass-mainstream media interest.

Oh...