Alasdair Lindsay experienced Fiorio Cup for a second year running, and its throwback feel left him with plenty of thoughts
Photography by Fiorio Cup & Toyota
Words by Alasdair Lindsay, Head of Digital Strategy
I have a confession to make: rallying and I have not been getting along well lately.
This year was my first Rally Finland. It was the rally I’d been waiting for all my life.
I had seen Petter Solberg’s Ouninpohja onboard a thousand times before. Traversing that hallowed road on recce gave an entirely new perspective – it’s narrower than you realize from television.
The nostalgia comes at you quick. The yellow house jump is only a couple of kilometers in – which, naturally, the DirtFish crew pulled up at.
There it stood in front of my eyes, finally. The house directly in front, the jump to the right.
I felt nothing.
Something was gravely wrong, clearly. Imagine a child religiously following the Selecão, Brazil’s national football team, then finally making the journey to its iconic Maracana stadium and feeling indifferent. It makes no sense. Ouninpohja is our Mecca. A pilgrimage.
This says nothing about Rally Finland. You can see at every turn rally fever gripping the entire nation. But, I suspect, it does say something about being involved in the top level of rallying right now.
Kalle Rovanperä was back to his best in Finland. A year ago, he was also at his best – but with the stakes lower than finally clinching that long-awaited home win. The car was a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2, not its bigger brother. The stage was Masseria Camarda. He was competing in the Fiorio Cup.
This year there was no Rovanperä – but there were plenty of other WRC regulars past and present at Casa Fiorio. François Delecour, Jan Solans, Pierre-Louis Loubet et al got to sample rallying at a different pace for the first time. But someone who knows it well – and Rovanperä – is Harri Toivonen, younger brother to the late Henri.
“Last year Kalle did this rally with his mother, who couldn’t read the pacenotes at all,” Toivonen explained. “So they just drove without any notes!
“But he was so relaxed all the time and saying: this is so fun, this is so nice. Now you look at the young drivers here: they did the recce and when I was going to talk to them, I couldn’t find them. They were in the corner watching videos.”
Looking at a screen is the last thing I’d want to be doing at Masseria Camarda. As a rally headquarters and service park it is – in my admittedly somewhat limited experience of rallying around the world – unique.
In the center stands Casa Fiorio itself, where former Lancia big boss Cesare Fiorio still resides. To the right stands the ‘breakfast room’ with full Ferrari F1 car bodywork – once fitted to Nigel Mansell’s chassis, now mounted to the wall – along with countless pieces of Lancia memorabilia. To the left is the swimming pool; the poolside bar is always busy on rally day. No matter which turn you take, you complete the circle to the back yard – Parco Assistenza.
After a year of working rallies where service parks were usually car parks or vast concrete emptiness, Fiorio Cup represents a refreshing change of pace. But then it used to feel more like this, didn’t it?
Not exactly. In a practical sense it’s a bit different. But the spirit is similar.
“If we speak about the [Fiorio Cup] service area, this one is mad!” said Toivonen.
“We had the service on the roads. Fuel stations, in the yards of the houses. The spectators, they saw – look, they stopped. So they came to look, and they were very close. Now they can’t get so close. Maybe some drivers are waving to them and there’s some autographs – but you can’t get as close as before.”
Alex Fiorio, son of Cesare and a Group N champion with Lancia himself, had a clear goal: create a format which puts the drivers on a more even playing field, with equal equipment – drivers aren’t even allowed to touch the car setup – with a far more relaxed itinerary than a standard stage rally.
Drivers are split into two teams: Team Italy for the locals and Team Europe for the others, four crews each in a style that copies the Ryder Cup. Toivonen put team spirit front and center: Il Capitano brought golf-style Team Europe caps for the drivers and co-drivers and at every lunch and dinner, cries of ‘Team Europe!’ would suddenly burst out of nowhere.
There’s also about an hour between passes of each stage and then a two-hour lunch break. Yes, that’s right. Two hours! And there was no onboard-watching in sight when the drivers sat down for lunch prepared by Masseria Camarda’s team of chefs. A quick shortcut through their kitchen at one point confirmed they don’t mess about when it comes to the food – as you’d hope in Southern Italy, of course. It far surpasses anything I’ve consumed during a typically rushed WRC lunch pitstop.
For the fans there’s still plenty of action, though, with Alex Bruschetta doing laps in a Škoda Fabia Rally2 evo, Jacopo Rigo in the Ford Fiesta N5 that Maria Paola Fiorio used in the Italian Rally Trophy this year, and a pair of Lancia Delta Integrales doing demo laps. There aren’t big lulls for the spectators, only more bandwidth for the participants to actually enjoy their passion.
One of the fun side effects of the format is most drivers are able to watch their rivals, study their lines and constantly try to find tenths of a second in places they didn’t think to look. More than once I spied Delecour and Loubet with phone in hand, timing the drivers themselves.
The drivers were engaged, competitive yet still relaxed and enjoying the spectacle. Even though it’s still the same sport, Fiorio Cup feels a world away from the WRC. Emphasis on feel.
“This is like bringing you back with the family,” said Toivonen. “Everyone that comes here is part of the rally family. That was [how] the ’80s [was].
“When you were doing a rally recce, in the evening you booked a hotel somewhere, you went to eat, you noticed the other drivers, so you joined with everyone. You were spending time together, joking, talking about different things – that’s gone. There’s nothing like this anymore.
“Now when they’re doing recce, they are going into the hotel, eating quickly, going into the room and spending most of the night with the videos. Then they are tired already next morning. Then the rally comes and it’s the same. When you’re having lunch during the rally day, you’re looking at videos. When the rally day is done in the evening, you go to the hotel, shower, eat, looking a bit at videos, then you go to your room and look at the videos until 3am. Then start again.
“When the rally is finished, a few drivers are jumping into the private plane and going home or to the test. Back then nobody had a private plane – well, except when Lancia would fly all the drivers together straight from a rally to a marketing activity. So Markku [Alèn], Henri [Toivonen], Miki [Biasion] and the co-drivers.
“The fun is gone.”
Now, I get where the opposite side of this argument is going to go. How can drivers complain about doing something most of us would dream of? The way Harri talks about it, I think it very much was a dream job in the past. And there’s no doubt at all that driving the car itself is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
That’s not today’s reality.
We’ve all collectively known in rally that something has to change. The question we need to pose it: how radical should that change be?
What do you, dear reader, consider the DNA of rallying? What are the essential components required to consider something a stage rally? And how flexible are we willing to be on that definition?
On the question of change, I asked Andrea Mabellini. One of this year’s European Rally Championship title contenders, Italian driver Mabellini also won the Fiorio Cup as an individual last Sunday (but Team Europe, led from the sidelines by Toivonen, took the Ryder Cup-style teams’ crown).
One point he highlights is pretty straightforward, very well known and a work in progress: cost. It’s a reason why a Delta Rally-run GR Yaris Rally2s are the go-to vehicle at Fiorio Cup, after all. The other factor he raises is more intriguing.
“It’s not possible [long-term] to have cars that cost a million euros and we race for so many kilometers,” said Mabellini.
“It cannot be entirely like a challenge that you start at 6am and finish in the night because it’s too much for people like us. You want to enjoy first and like this it’s more than a job. It’s so tough. For the rest: the nature of rallying is already more spectacular than circuit racing.”
There is something in this. When considering how to ‘rebuild’ rallying, I like to look at it like building blocks. What did we have in the past that worked – and have factors changed that means what worked in the past can’t work now, or perhaps the other way around?
Length of stage and length of itinerary still appears widely considered as a key aspect of rallying. I’m not so sure it’s sacrosanct as some might like to suggest. It is a component of it, sure. Looking at the previous WRC round, Central European Rally, for example, whatever a modern WRC event looked like you’d still want the Col de Jan stage in it (where Grégoire Munster and Thierry Neuville both went off). But for the rest? Maybe it’s time to start thinking about this the other way around.
How do we want rallying to feel, and how do you design a set of sporting rules around that objective? How do you design a version of rallying where sitting down for hours on end watching stage videos – which is not practical to ban outright due to the impossibility of achieving blanket enforcement – becomes a waste of time because there’s so little advantage in it?
All motorsport was once primarily a test of endurance. The first grand prix was 769.36 miles long and took over 12 hours to complete. Do you think if every Formula 1 race was like this today, it would command a global audience into the hundreds of millions?
I doubt it.
In Masseria Camarda the cars are modern, the stages short, the format unusual (the best three stage times out of four counted, hence why Mabellini won even though Loubet was fastest across the four stages in total). You cannot copy-paste the Fiorio Cup and make it the standard for rallying. It is a single-venue event using one road – though that’s not for lack of imagination from Alex Fiorio, who has looked into building new stages elsewhere in Masseria Camarda and street stages in Ceglie Messapica.
Discourse around rallying’s future has been at fever pitch lately. Rally1 didn’t work; one manufacturer that was a key architect left before it began and none arrived to take its place. Hybrid came and went. WRC27 does not appear to be going to plan.
These are all critical points. But I wonder if we skipped a step when figuring all this stuff out. We became so obsessed with the technical formula, the event formats and promotional structures of rally that we forgot the most essential building block before the rest can be determined: what is the ideology of rally? How do we want rallying to make us all feel?
The Fiorio Cup felt like what I had hoped Rally Finland would stir up within me. That there is a mismatch between the theoretical spectacle of each event and the emotion attached to it speaks volumes.
I learned to enjoy rally again. To work in this discipline is an extremely rare opportunity and I was struggling to appreciate it. How modern technology has shifted the fundamental working practises of our discipline has been to its detriment in many ways and
“I don’t know what to do,” admitted Toivonen, after our long chat about the state of rallying. “If I knew what to do, I would try to be president of the FIA!”
Though that job is now near-certain to remain as-is for the next election cycle, change is coming with the ongoing promoter sale. A potentially once-in-30-years opportunity to consider how rally’s largest touchpoint with the wider world should function is rapidly approaching. What will we do with this opportunity?
I only hope that it isn’t business as usual. What I usually see as a blurry mess of onboard video dependence (or in DirtFish’s case, video editing), few hours of sleep per night and an inability to bring in new fans to our sport starts to feel a little less insurmountable a challenge to conquer after each visit to Puglia.
Words:Alasdair Lindsay
Tags: Andrea Mabellini, Fiorio Cup, Fiorio Cup 2025, Francois Delecour, Harri Toivonen, Jan Solans, Pierre-Louis Loubet
Publish Date October 29, 2025 DirtFish 
https://dirtfish-editorial.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/2025/10/5RHiiZfk-DSC8353-copia-780x520.jpg October 29, 2025
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