Yesterday, Mitsubishi announced that they will retire from cross country rallying, starting with next years Dakar. Mitsubishi’s decision is based on the current economical situation and it’s a huge strike against all cross country rallying since the marque has been quite dominant for a long, long time. However, this year they failed to win the Dakar after launching a new car based on the Lancer road car. Instead, the victory went to Volkswagen – that has now managed to win an event.

So, what does this mean to the WRC? Mitsubishi retired from the WRC a few years ago – and already before the financial crisis started they announced that they’re probably not coming back in a while. Now, a comeback seems to be even more distant – but Mitsubishi’s retirement can still be good to the WRC. Why? Because Volkswagen is thinking of entering! Volkswagen’s motorsport manager Kris Nissen has said that the brand will overlook all their motorsport activities and that WRC is one of the options they’re looking at.

Of course Volkswagen’s cross country involvement has costed a lot of money, and now that they’re winning they may want one or two more victories. However, without Mitsubishi those victories wont be worth very much since there in practice are no real concurrents in the races (RalliArt France will continue to run the Mitsu team privately, but that’s really not the same thing). And when Volkswagen has already considered retiring from the sport, it seems a little more likely when their main concurrent retires leaving them alone at the top. So, it still remains to see what happens – but my guess is that Volkswagen will either retire instantly, or retire after a year or two. But I don’t think Volkswagen will leave all rallying activity. They’re in a quite OK economical situation, and when the others struggle they will probably challenge instead. A WRC bid shouldn’t be very distant – and there are already rumours about  a Prodrive led WRC challenge from Volkswagen. At least, Skoda (which is in practice a part of Volkswagen) has left the door open by saying that they will not enter the WRC.

My guess is that we’ll see Volkswagen in the WRC and that it’s not very far away…Time will show.