Did you get bitten by the motorsport bug after DTS or f1 fandom in general and now you want to watch more cars driving around? You should consider rally! Itās fun! I donāt hate any of the drivers yet! There are narratives! Let me tell you all about it! With words and pictures!Ā
Awkward Memorial Preface
What is rally?
Driver/Co-driver Dynamics
Hyundai
Toyota
M-Sport
WRC2
Other People
This multi-part primer aspires to the era of livejournal canon primers with the hopes of there someday being multiple pages of fic in the World Rally Championship RPF tag on ao3. I started following the WRC this year, in the middle of Rally Sweden. Since then I semi obsessively watched all of the event highlights available on WRC+, which goes back to 2014. Iāve gone onto some weird Instagram spirals and learned very many facts. But Iām still new to this, and this primer is definitely a work in progress, and I would love for people who know more than me to come into my inbox with contradictory opinions and things I should know.Ā
It was suggested that I start off by explaining why I think rally is cool, because I DO think itās SO COOL. That's below the cut.
I started watching the WRC in the middle of February, and itās May now, and I watched SO MANY HIGHLIGHTS, and have written 20k about these dudes being married in space. Itās taken over a big chunk of my brain, and Iām really happy about that! Itās fun!
I said I didnāt hate any of the drivers kind of flippantly, but thatās true, and really refreshing. The driver I like the least itās because heās annoyingly good, and I have both respect and fondness for him. Thereās a lot of camaraderie in the WRC. They arenāt racing wheel to wheel, which means itās a different sort of competition, itās all down to your abilities and the conditions and the reliability of the car, not what the other guy does. Itās not as glamorous as F1, theyāre out in the middle of nowhere driving narrow mountain roads.Ā
Which ā I think itās just really nice to look at. Itās fun to watch cars slide around through really beautiful scenery. Rally at its best is beautiful on a cinematic level, which is a corny thing to say, but also true. Iām not a car fucker at all, but getting to see rally cars jump is amazing.
I like that itās kind of DIY ā itās way more professional and organized than it used to be, but they still have to fix the cars themselves if thereās a problem, theyāre getting muddy changing tires on the side of the road.
Trying to explain what makes rally so interesting I am going to defer to nine time WRC champion Sebastien Loeb, who has done all different kinds of racing, but says that rally is his favorite because as a driver itās the most enjoyable amount of knowledge to have. In circuit racing the driver learns the track, Loeb thinks it gets boring. In something fully off-road the driver doesn't know whatās off the next hill, and can never push to the maximum because there's too much uncertainty about what youāre driving into. Rallying you know the road a bit, you have an idea of what comes next, so you can make an informed decision about how hard to push, but youāre never sure enough to be fully comfortable. Rallying is a combination of intense planning and dealing with the unexpected, which creates a really exciting competition to watch.Ā
I went for some highlights on youtube to tempt you into paying attention, and couldnāt find the ideal compilation, but here are some things to try!
This video is a collection of dramatic moments from 2022.
This is just 35 minutes of cars going by without any commentary. I did not watch all of that, and donāt think you should, but give it a try!
āCarmilla was published years before Draculaā well before THAT. Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital āCapital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.ā so really we should all consider Marx the origin of modern vampire literature.
Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Dominican Republic.
Images: Photograph of 3 canvases from the series in the solo exhibition 'Our Celestial Sphere' at Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019.
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick Institute of Technology, and Fingal County Council. Images: Pallas Projects/Studios & Kerry Guinan.
(Original caption from artistās website)
Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Do
And after contacting the Irish Museum of Modern Art and being referred to a curator (!), they provided me with the caption information that was used when displaying the work for the Staying With The Trouble exhibition in 2025 (thank you so much IMMA staff!!)
Artists is a series of blank, square canvases, each signed by a staff member in the manufacturing facility that produced the canvases in the La Romana Free Trade Zone, the Dominican Republic. The manufacturer, Daler Rowney, is a popular supplier of art materials in Ireland. The artist coordinated the project remotely by contacting the facility manager. The signatories volunteered to take part in the project upon invitation. They are Johan Rivera, Carlos Roa, Aneury Rondon, and Orlando Saldivar.
Anyways, Iād spent about the last 6 hours of my life trying to find out this information after some discussion on artist supply chains came up on the dashboard. Hope you enjoy the work as much as I do.
