Guest columnist Paul Haines outlines his real-world experience of promoting the WRC back in 1999
Photography by Girardo & Co. Archive
Words by Paul Haines
As Bernie Ecclestone’s ‘rally guy’ back in the 1990s, Paul Haines can offer a unique perspective on how the world of WRC broadcasting and promotion has rolled out down the last three decades.
The 1999 season was a big one for the World Rally Championship. World Rally Car regulations, launched in ’97, were coming into their own. Peugeot and Škoda made their debuts with the new 206 and Octavia WRC cars. Ford replaced the ‘Group A-plus’ Escort WRC with the wild-looking Focus WRC and tempted Colin McRae from his paternal home at Subaru with an F1-size paycheck and the lure of leading an exciting new project.
After a development year, Seat embarked on its first full season with the Cordoba WRC, while Subaru and Toyota returned as pre-season favorites alongside Mitsubishi, which was still competitive with the ever-evolving Group A-specification Lancer. That made seven fully-fledged manufacturer teams with the promise of more to come.
But, for me, none of that was the biggest news in the final year of the millennium. While the WRC was booming on the stages, behind the scenes the sport had been struggling with an issue that will be all too familiar to those reading many of the recent posts about WRC Promoter from the DirtFish team. In ’99, the commercial rights for the WRC (and all other FIA championships outside F1) were held by a company called International Sportsworld Communicators (ISC). The owner of ISC? A Mr Bernard Charles Ecclestone. Remember him?
But while Bernie was in the midst of transforming F1 with a commercial model that took full ownership of event delivery and sold all-inclusive TV rights deals for ever increasing fees, the WRC just sat in the background.
The WRC didn't receive much attention from ISC, until its popularity could no longer be ignored
In this pre-internet age, the TV broadcast was king. F1 was spending hundreds of millions on delivering centralized live television production and launching state-of-the art digital channels, meanwhile the WRC stumbled along with a disjointed approach and ad-hoc coverage from each event.
All that seemed set to change in 1999. The WRC’s booming popularity could no longer be ignored, and a new deal with one of Europe’s biggest TV production companies, Spanish giant MediaPro, promised to deliver the first dedicated TV production of daily and post-event highlights from every round of the championship. And that was just the start. Live stages, which were seen as the holy grail that would really bring the WRC into the homes of the masses, were also in the pipeline.
It seemed like the start of a brave new world, and with Bernie’s hand on the deal, what could go wrong? Well, plenty as it turned out.
January 18, 1999. It’s 7pm and I’m stood in the service park in Tallard at the end of the first day of the Monte Carlo Rally. While the mechanics are all busy servicing and repairing cars after a chaotic first day on the snowy stages, there is still that sense of relative calm you get when a team of dedicated professionals all rise to a challenge – this is their moment to deliver what they are trained to do.
There’s none of that calm in the TV truck in front of me. People are running around, shouting and waving their arms, and it’s clear this is more than just a bit of Latin temperament in the heat of the moment. As the time for the satellite feed for the first day’s highlights came and went, the airwaves remained black. When the feed finally did go out, it was poor, at best (Amateurish and riddled with errors if I’m being more honest).
I’d been working for F1 TV and ISC for four years at this time. Nobody was actually employed directly by ISC in production, we all worked on F1 and the rally stuff just sat in the background.
While the bulk of my work was out on F1 events directing the new digital world feed and producing highlights shows back in Biggin Hill, I was also known as ‘The Rally Guy’ in a team of F1 specialists. In fact that’s how I got the job in the first place – they needed someone who understood rallying to make sense of all these random tapes that arrived after each event who could then put it all together to produce the official end of season review DVDs.
So when the MediaPro deal was announced, ‘The Rally Guy’ was tasked with heading down to Monte Carlo to keep an eye on things and report back to the big bosses on how it all went. I clearly remember sitting in our hire car on the Wednesday evening after the rally had finished and the final feed had gone out, and discussing with my colleague just how honest we needed that report to be. For me it was clear: what I had seen what was not good enough, and we needed to let the right people know.
A few days later I was back in Biggin Hill and sat in the office of Eddie Baker, who ran F1 TV for Bernie. As always with Eddie, the message was to the point and crystal clear. MediaPro were out. Done. Bernie couldn’t allow things to be this bad and so the decision was made – we were doing the Swedish Rally production in-house. With six weeks still to go before the F1 season started in Melbourne, we had the full resources of the team to get things started. But no-one knew a thing about rally – expect me, ‘The Rally Guy’.
The TV production from Monte Carlo was not good, leading to a drastic call being made
So off I went to Sweden with the legend behind the camera that is Kevin Vernall (or Todge as he’s better known, don’t ask me why…) and we had a week to get a production plan in place while the engineers back in Biggin Hill put together a TV truck and technical solution that could deliver in an environment none of them had ever faced.
After a few sleepless nights, we all arrived in Karlstad in our shiny new ISC uniforms, with the rally world looking on across the service park with some sceptism on how Bernie’s boys would cope in this very unfamiliar world.
Going from zero to delivering a full event production in two weeks flat was some achievement by the team – but we did it and delivered it with only a few minor bumps along the way. The rest of that season became one those involved with would not forget, as we dovetailed a full F1 season with WRC events to finally give the sport a TV product from which it could move forward.
That 1999 season proved to be the only year Bernie’s team delivered TV production. After an investigation by the European Commission into ISC’s agreements with the FIA (which restricted competition according to the EC), the company and commercial rights to the WRC were sold to Prodrive and Subaru supremo David Richards in 2000.
David Richards (left, pictured in 2002) took over the TV rights at the turn of the millennium
The responsibility to deliver the TV production was given to London-based North One, which later bought ISC from Richards in 2007 and then won a new contract to became the series promoter from 2010-20.
The whole sorry saga that then unfolded after the takeover of North One by Convers Sports Initiatives (CSI) and its subsequent bankruptcy in 2011 is a whole other story. But that moment led to Eurosport stepping in for the 2012 season, before the current agreement (initially between Red Bull and Sportsman Media – latterly KW25) heralded the establishment of the incumbent WRC Promoter firm in 2013.
At the time, this was seen as a massive boost for the championship, but despite improvements in the TV product and the launch of the WRC+ platform (renamed All Live) and Rally.TV, the sport appears to have struggled to gain traction with new audiences and grow in the ever-changing and increasingly competitive digital and social media worlds.
As I sit here now in 2025 and read about the current state of the WRC, the situation on the commercial side seems rather worrying. Whoever wins the tender to become the new WRC Promoter has to look to some of the missed opportunities.
Comparisons with the current booming state of Formula 1 – even the World Endurance Championship with its Hypercar regulations – aren’t always fair or valid and require a deeper understanding. But there are lessons the WRC can learn from both as it looks to a future that we all hope hope will be a brighter one.
Words:Paul Haines
Tags: Paul Haines, WRC, WRC 1999, WRC Promoter
