On the latest episode of Stage Mode, Nicky Grist offered his thoughts on the demands of modern rallying
Photography by Hyundai & Girardo & Co. Archive
Words by Luke Barry
In a world that’s evolved so rapidly in the 21st century, it’s no secret that the World Rally Championship places different demands on its competitors today compared to 20 years ago.
But it’s nevertheless still fascinating to get a tangible read on just how much things have changed.
Thierry Neuville and Nicky Grist’s WRC careers never overlapped. When Neuville started his first world rally in 2010, Grist hadn’t competed in one for four years – and that was a one-off deputising for the injured Sébastien Loeb.
So when the pair got chatting at the recent Eifel Rallye Festival, their compared notes featured few similarities.
On the latest episode of DirtFish’s weekly podcast, Stage Mode, Grist shares what he and the reigning world champion got talking about.
Neuville compared notes recently with Grist
“We were just chatting about the sport and the way it’s progressed,” Grist said. “Thierry said that his road sections are taking up with studying up to 200 photographs and videos of the next stage, looking in depth what the road conditions are like, where the clean lines are, can you cut? And they’ve got these weather stage crews that take all these pictures and feed them back – we never had any of that.
“It was just you, the car, and off you went. But that’s how the sport has changed so much, and the sad thing is I think it’s very difficult to come back from where we are to be honest. Unless you come up with 14 brand-new events where nobody’s ever been before, you can’t take all of this old footage away.
“Thierry said in some cases if there was a cut, if you made the decision not to cut and you slide a bit wide and lose your speed on the next corner, you’ve lost four tenths of a second and it was all on that one corner, for us losing four seconds was nothing! But now four tenths of a second is a lot, never mind four seconds, and that’s how the sport has changed.”
A lot of people now talk about rallying being far more like circuit racing than ever before, with drivers analyzing every single piece of data because each tenth of a second now genuinely counts.
Grist thinks adding more endurance elements back to rallying – both in terms of the itineraries and the cars – would be of benefit.
“I think a bit of endurance would make all the difference here, and just maybe take a bit of something away from the cars, make people think more about looking after the kit more than just being able to drive over anything at almost any speed,” he said.
“You can always break a car, don’t get me wrong, but you can see with the modern cars they can go over rocks and bumps and the suspension takes it all. It’s a bit like Formula 1 in many ways, so now the teams are engineering the cars to be absolutely optimum when they’re going in a straight line but if anything unusual happens to that suspension, bing, you lose a wheel.
“That’s how in depth the drivers are looking at every corner, every surface change, and the engineers are just fine tuning the cars to such a degree now that it’s very close to disaster what these guys are doing.”
Grist has never experienced the modern way so will naturally have an affinity for how things used to be, but he suspects today’s competitors are not enjoying themselves as much as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s when the Welshman was active.
“The young drivers of today, they don’t know any different,” Grist pointed out. “For them, it’s turning up at an event and working from morning ’til night – be it PR, be it recce, be it working on the videos, fine tuning those pacenotes, studying Rally TV of a previous driver on that stage, it’s such a concentrated effort from the time you arrive in the country to the end of the rally and you go home.
“And when you think about rallies back in our day, recce could be quite a length. In Greece once we ended up near Corinth Canal and there was this one hotel resort that we stayed in, and Juha [Kankkunen] said ‘Let’s have a couple of days off and sit at the pool’, and we could do that because you were free to do what you want. That was taking motorsport, and the pleasure of motorsport, to another level because you could relax, enjoy yourselves, you never had the stress and strain of having to study the video, drivers making sure the greater majority of the stage is in their head.
“For Colin [McRae] once I remember, it was 2001 or 2002, the head recce mechanic gave Colin this case as he was going to his room and he asked ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a camera system to allow you to review the stages.’ ‘WHAT!? Review the stages, I don’t want that. Take it away.’ And they took it away, he wasn’t interested – he was happy just to get in there and sort it out, and that’s where certain elements of the sport now are quite pressured.
“In our day we weren’t out getting blind drunk every night, but you could have a glass of wine with dinner or a beer and that was the pleasure of it, and they were great times.”
You can listen to the full episode of Stage Mode now wherever you get your podcasts.
Words:Luke Barry
Tags: Nicky Grist, Stage Mode, Thierry Neuville, WRC
Publish Date August 11, 2025 DirtFish
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