Put some more thought into it and answer a couple of questions from the course of the WRC regulations.
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Peugeot 206s?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Peugeot 307s?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Citroen Xsaras?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Citroen C4s?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Citroen DS3s?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Ford Focuses?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Ford Fiestas?
Where are the 25.000 four wheel drive Toyota Corollas?
That's a damn big lot of invisible cars and the list doesn't even include all the models that have been used as basis for WRC racers.
Do you know what I find amusing about your post? You are so quick to accuse me of "not putting thought" into what I wrote that you've missed the way the answer is right under your nose. You quoted the Wikipedia article on the World Rally Car like this:
Between 1997 and 2010, the regulations mandated that World Rally Cars must have been built upon a production car with a minimum production run of 2500 units. A number of modifications could be made including increasing the engine displacement up to 2.0L, forced induction (including an anti-lag system), addition of four wheel drive, fitment of a sequential gearbox, aerodynamic body modifications, weight reduction to a minimum of 1230 kg and chassis strengthening for greater rigidity.
Unlike the requirements for the preceding Group A cars, manufacturers were no longer required to build "homologation specials" in order to meet approval. The base model did not need to have all the characteristics of the WRC car, as evidenced from cars such the Peugeot 206, 307, Citroën Xsara and Škoda Fabia, which during this period had no road car variant with a turbocharged petrol engine or four wheel drive.
When what you really should have paid attention to is this:
Between 1997 and 2010, the regulations mandated that World Rally Cars must have been built upon a production car with a minimum production run of 2500 units. A number of modifications could be made including increasing the engine displacement up to 2.0L, forced induction (including an anti-lag system), addition of four wheel drive, fitment of a sequential gearbox, aerodynamic body modifications, weight reduction to a minimum of 1230 kg and chassis strengthening for greater rigidity.
Unlike the requirements for the preceding Group A cars, manufacturers were no longer required to build "homologation specials" in order to meet approval. The base model did not need to have all the characteristics of the WRC car, as evidenced from cars such the Peugeot 206, 307, Citroën Xsara and Škoda Fabia, which during this period had no road car variant with a turbocharged petrol engine or four wheel drive.
There is a very good reason why Peugeot, Citroen, Ford and Toyota never produced 25,000 four-wheel drive variants of those cars: they did not need to. The idea behind homologation is simple - it is to keep rally cars consistent in appearance with their road-going counterparts. The 2,500 is the minimum number needed for major changes to the bodywork, like when Ford revised the Focus' styling some time around 2004. The rules are written that way so that manufacturers can enter their cars as soon as a new model is produced; they don't need to waste time making 25,000 before they can be re-homologated.
This was a problem back in the 1980s when manufacturers only needed to produce 2,000 cars annually for full homologation. They only had to produce 10% of that number any time they wanted to upgrade the bodywork - like that enormous rear wing on the Peugeot 205 T16 E2. The problem was that the manufacturers would take twenty road cars, upgrade them, get the changes re-homologated, and then put the cars into storage. The public would never actually get to drive those cars, and so the Group B entries were moving further and further away from their road-going counterparts. The FIA wanted to put a stop to this, so when Group B (and Group S) was terminated, they raised the number of cars needed to be produced so that making "homologation specials" became too expensive to be viable.
These days, homologation works like this: if I want to enter the Subaru BRZ as a World Rally Car, I first need to produce 25,000 BRZs in a year. This makes the car elegible to become a World Rally Car. I can then modify a BRZ to fit in with the WRC regulations for engines and drivetrain and so on, but I cannot actually change anything about the shape of the car. If the BRZ was a four-door car, I cannot suddenly take two doors out (yes, I know it's a two-door, but this is the clearest example). If I want to do that, I need to produce 2,500 two-door cars before I can re-homologate. I would be expected to produce 25,000 in a year, but I only need to make 10% of that number for changes to a car that has already been homologated. It's just a way of getting updated models of current cars into the sport sooner.
The point of all this is so that the public can see me rallying a Subaru BRZ, and that they can see it looks the same as the road-going BRZ. The internal workings of the car don't really matter, because they are built to a formula. I don't get any net performance gain because the rules are very restrictive.
Homologation works very different today compared to the introduction of Group A regulations in 1987.
No but really, that rule is from the era of Group A and nowadays reads like this. It's actually the paragraph preceding the one you copied for your post.
Wikipedia isn't the only source out there. This is taken from page 540 of Reinard Klein's
Rally Cars, published in 2000:
"[World Rally] Cars have to be based on true production cars. They are steel-bodied, front-engined four-seaters, derived from a "family" that may include saloons, hatchbacks and other variants, but made in a minimum quantity of 25,000 per year - ten times the Group A figure. They have to be at least four metres long. At least 2,500 of the basic engines must be produced annually, and the maximum capacity is two litres."
As I said, I can find no references to that number changing when WRC regulations were revised for 2011.
