Japan and India waiting in the wings, says Mosley

FIA president Max Mosley says there are no plans to increase the WRC from its current 14 rounds, but a number of rallies presently on the schedule will come under scrutiny.

"There is a lot of talk about bringing new rallies in," he said, "and I think we have to look at the weakest ones going out and the other ones coming in. We know of one or two rallies that are absolutely on the limit of spectator safety, and there may be one or two that fail on those grounds."

Japan is home to two of the WRC's leading marques, Mitsubishi and Subaru, while India is seen as a huge untapped market for a high-profile FIA event. Mosley also mentioned Indonesia and China, both of which briefly held WRC events in the late '90s, as longer-term possibilities, but believes that neither country is currently in a position to return to the world stage.

"With Japan, we have a possible World Championship event," said Mosley. "And at one time we were saying we had one in Indonesia, we had an event in China and we were hoping to move on to India. If you have Indonesia, China and India, then you have half the world's population, and each of those countries would be holding their event of the year, so it would make complete sense to use rallying to promote motorsport in those areas."

Mosley cited the internal unrest in Indonesia and a lack of financial support in China as obstacles to those two events returning to the WRC roster, but said: "India is on the way up now and I think we are going to see progress there. It's a very obvious way of spreading motorsport around the world."

The FIA president also mentioned the North American market as a longer-term target for the WRC, but likened the situation to Formula 1's 10-year sojourn away from the United States. The last WRC round to be held in the USA was the 1988 Olympus Rally, based in Washington State.