@Jimlaad43 Saudi Arabia Rally is a joke indeed. Every WRC driver got at least a puncture, when it comes in a stage and how often it happens during the event was just a big lottery.
As for the strategy to miss some rally to get an advantage, it can't pay off from a statistical point of view since, at most, you'll only catch up points you gave up.
Now I don't quite think Saudi Arabia Rally is a joke, I just don't think it's the right place to end the season.
It's on the calendar for monetary (as long as there aren't too many, this isn't necessarily a bad thing) and sportswashing reasons (the reason it
shouldn't be on the calendar). These are objections that I must preface the following paragraphs with and do outscore everything else to make me overall object to the rally's inclusion completely. However....
There are two things I do have to give this rally credit for as a new inclusion on the calendar.
A: The use of the Jeddah Corniche Circuit as the Service Park. (As much as I hate that track with every bone of my body, they are at least using the facilities a lot, so much better than a lot of the new circuits built in new nations for F1 since 2000)
B: Saudi does at least have some Rallying history with the running of Dakar a few times. (So where were the spectators).
The ploughed roads in the desert to "create" rocky roads for the rally were pretty pathetic, but a Desert Rally is something the calendar severely lacked otherwise. These fake roads gave a completely random driver order on the first days and sent the championship contenders fighting for 7th place rather than the win and spreading them out into the bad road positions the next days too. Being first to find the rocks for punctures also doesn't help.
In the end, the WRC is the one sport in the world which benefits most from different cultures and geographies. They race in different surfaces (Snow, Ice, Asphalt, Gravel) and these are very different around the world, with other factors such as rain, mud, dust, rocks, altitude, ambient temperature and general geography matter and make a huge difference. An F1 track in Bahrain can be pretty similar to one in Germany, but a Bahrain Rally would be enormously different to a German one. The WRC does need to go around this, and it's Desert Rallies really have just been Australia (only the Perth-based one though), Mexico (altitude) and Jordan. The sport benefits from at least one of these a season, but not necessarily at the season finale. Puncture lottery is an interesting aspect in mid-season (hence Acropolis' calendar position), but not when it completely derails a title challenge when there is no time to recover.
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To move onto the point of Ogier missing rounds helping, well stage running order in the middle of the season does have an effect. The calendar next season has literally swapped Italy and Japan in response to Evans having to open the road all season on the big block of gravel in the middle of the year and having little chance to compete for wins spending all three days with the slowest roads. Ogier skipped some, was able to get a good road position on Day 1, lead it and then reap up the points on Sunday while having to claw back a deficit. In the end the strategy of a few big results paid off over Evans's consistent not-quite good enough results on mid-season gravel hampered by never having competition to take the title lead off him mid-season because Rovanpera wasn't quite on it this year and the Hyundai's were outmatched.
Ogier's title is totally legitimate and congratulations to him, but it has highlighted how much road order matters. This is of course why the road order is made as it is because otherwise Evans would have run away with the title 3 rounds ago.
You need to look no further than Rally Estonia to understand this. Oliver Solberg's win was spectacular and well deserved, but as a part-time driver he benefitted from cleaned roads by the time of his runs through the stages on Friday, which then moves him into the same road positions for Saturday and Sunday where he could keep it up. He didn't plan or aim to win the Rally, but in the end a talented driver in the best car in the best running order position can make the stars align.
Championship leader going in? Evans. Evans stage wins in Estonia? 0.
We got a 3 way title finale and an extraordinary championship result by clever design to prevent runaway championship leaders, but please don't give us the disaster of Saudi to finish the season if we have to endure that Rally. Stick it around March or something where it can give us a nice crazy result that drivers can recover from.
