Rovanperä and co-driver Jonne Halttunen on a liaison section at Rally Japan 2025, the penultimate round before he left the WRC. Photo: TTTNIS / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
The WRC’s makers’ trophy is older than its drivers’ title. When the championship launched in 1973 it crowned only a manufacturer, and drivers waited until 1979 for a world crown of their own. From 2027, that original trophy gets a new name, a wider guest list and the strictest attendance policy in the series.
The FIA World Motor Sport Council approved the remaining 2027 WRC sporting regulations at its autumn meeting on October 19. The Manufacturers’ Championship becomes the Constructors’ Championship, open to car makers and independent tuners in the same classification. Next to it sits a brand-new WRC Teams’ Championship. Both are reserved for the Rally1 category.
On paper, two trophies sounds like twice the opportunity. The fine print is less generous: one title is for organizations that can afford to be everywhere, and the other is for the ones that can’t.
Fifteen rallies or seven: the price of each trophy
To be eligible for the Constructors’ title, a constructor has to contest every round. In 2027 that means all 15 events on the calendar, from Rallye Monte-Carlo on January 21–24 to Rally Saudi Arabia on November 25–28, with long-haul trips to Kenya, Japan, the United States, Paraguay, Chile and Saudi Arabia in between.
That attendance rule is the real filter. Building a fast car is one bill. Shipping cars, spares, service crews and recce vehicles to six non-European rounds is a separate, recurring one, and it doesn’t care how clever the aero is.
The Teams’ Championship is built for a different budget. It runs over seven nominated events, and the FIA has attached two conditions: one of them must be an overseas round, and a team must start the season finale to be eligible. Seven is fewer than half the calendar. The finale requirement is the promoter’s insurance policy, guaranteeing that every Teams’ contender is in Saudi Arabia when the season ends rather than skipping the last long-haul trip once the budget runs dry.
If you need a refresher on how points flow between driver and maker classifications, our guide to rally championship points covers the current system.
Why “constructor” is the right word
The rename isn’t cosmetic. The WRC27 technical framework no longer requires a car to be derived from a production model. Bodywork only has to fit inside a defined reference volume around a tubular safety cell, so a top-class rally car can now be a bespoke shape with no showroom twin. Calling the people who build those cars “manufacturers” would have been inaccurate.
It also matters because the first new entrants aren’t traditional car companies. Project Rally One, founded by engineer Lionel Hansen, Yves Matton and Prospeed, is a tuner-led WRC27 program that unveiled its car in Belgium last month and is targeting a two-car debut at Monte-Carlo. In Spain, the national federation RFEDA has partnered with RMC Motorsport on a Rally1 car of its own, conditional on finishing and homologating it. Under the new wording, both would chase the same trophy as Toyota on identical terms.
The cost ceiling helps make that plausible. A ready-to-compete WRC27 car in asphalt specification is capped at €345,000, and the FIA says that is more than 50% below the outgoing formula.
The kit-car catch
Rally1 in 2027 will hold two kinds of car: new WRC27 machines and WRC Kit Cars, which are existing Rally2 cars fitted with an approved aero package. The kit rules, approved in June, cap the kit at €7,500 and cover homologated front fenders, a front bumper and a rear aerodynamic device. Only Rally2 cars homologated before December 31, 2026 qualify, and they are eligible for the top class in 2027 and 2028 only.
Here is the detail that ties the whole structure together. Only a manufacturer registered for the WRC as a constructor may homologate a kit, and in the kit’s first year that constructor has to contest every WRC event with at least two cars. In other words, anyone who brings a kit to market is already committed to the full-season attendance that the Constructors’ title demands. The two rules are one commitment seen from two directions.
That leaves the Teams’ Championship as the natural home for everyone else: privately run kit cars, national-federation projects and teams that want Rally1 exposure without a 15-round bill. It is also why individual 2027 seats are getting so complicated, as Adrien Fourmaux’s situation shows, and why a cheap kit route is not the same thing as a cheap season.
One extra millimetre, and a lever for the FIA
The council also raised the maximum turbo restrictor diameter from 32mm to 33mm for both WRC27 cars and WRC Kit Cars. One millimetre buys more than it sounds like. Restrictor area scales with the square of the diameter, so the opening grows by about 6.3%. On a turbocharged engine that runs into the restrictor’s airflow limit at high rpm, more area means a higher ceiling for top-end power, and engine builders are very good at finding that ceiling.
Because both specifications get the same increase, the baseline gap between them doesn’t move. The more interesting change is the clause that comes with it: the FIA can now apply technical or sporting measures to keep “appropriate” performance differences between vehicle classes. That is balance of performance in all but name, and the word “sporting” means the tools aren’t limited to engine hardware.
The FIA has to manage two gaps at once. WRC27 cars need to stay ahead of kit cars, or nobody builds a WRC27 car. Kit cars need to stay ahead of the standard Rally2 cars in WRC2, which continues alongside WRC3 and the WRC Masters Cup, or the kit is pointless. The first time the FIA uses this power will tell us which gap it is more worried about.
Who is actually building for this
Toyota has committed to a new-generation car, a project that also hangs over Kalle Rovanperä’s possible return. Ford Racing has confirmed a full factory return from 2028 with M-Sport, with an all-new car due in 2029. That timeline means M-Sport’s Ford program goes through two seasons of the new title structure before its WRC27 car turns a wheel in competition. We looked at that two-year run-up when Ford made its announcement.
What to watch before Monte-Carlo
- Constructor registrations. The every-round rule means the number of registered constructors is the most honest measure of how healthy the new era really is.
- Teams’ Championship nominations. Which seven events teams choose, and which overseas round they pick, will show where the money is going. Expect Monte-Carlo and the European gravel rounds to be popular choices, and expect the finale in Saudi Arabia to be on every list because it has to be.
- Kit homologations. Each kit needs a constructor willing to run two cars at every event in year one. Count the kits and you’ll know how many constructors are in.
- The first performance intervention. Whether the FIA adjusts WRC27 cars, kit cars or both, and whether it uses a technical or sporting tool, will show how it intends to manage a mixed Rally1 field.
The 2027 structure doesn’t guarantee a bigger Rally1 field. What it does is give teams that will never do all 15 rounds a trophy worth chasing, while making sure that the oldest title in the championship still goes to someone who turned up everywhere.
How many constructors do you think register before Monte-Carlo? And if you ran a privateer kit car, which seven rounds would you nominate? Tell us in the comments.
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