1973: the championship starts

What the era was

The world championship began as a competition between car makers. Drivers were not part of it.

The championship was founded for 1973 on the bones of the International Championship for Manufacturers, which had run 1970-1972 and whose nine rallies were carried straight into the new calendar. The first round, the Rallye Monte-Carlo, started on 19 January 1973. Thirteen events ran across four continents, from Monte Carlo and the Safari to Poland, the 1000 Lakes, Press-on-Regardless in the United States and the Tour de Corse. Alpine-Renault took the first title with 147 points; Fiat and Ford followed on 84 and 76.

There was no drivers' title of any kind. Not a lesser one, not an unofficial one. None. A driver's career was measured in works contracts, start money and national fame.

The rules that defined it

What a weekend looked like

Marathon distances, and attrition as a headline statistic. Monte Carlo 1973 was still a concentration rally: crews set off from about nine European cities, the total route ran to 4,800 km with 18 special stages making up 420 km of it, 278 cars started and 44 finished. The Safari was roughly 5,000 km entirely on open public roads, averaging over 100 km/h, with bull bars, snorkels and helicopters flown ahead to move wildlife off the route. The Acropolis broke cars over up to 800 competitive kilometres.

Servicing was strung along the road. There was no central park to return to: teams put vans at points on the itinerary, chase cars leapfrogged between them, and outside a scheduled service the crew worked on the car themselves. Practice was effectively unlimited, and the RAC Rally ran its stages blind.

How the game models it

Era rules live in data, never as a year check in the simulation. This span is one ruleset, named World Championship and Group 4, running 1973 to 1981, and it sets the dials that make the decade feel like itself:

• Recce is free and notes are descriptive rather than numeric. The systematised pace-note craft is not yet universal.
• Service is chase cars strung along the route. Roadside work is legal and normal, which means a broken car is often recoverable where a later era would retire it.
• Homologation is Group 4, with the 1976 relaxation modelled as its own change rather than a single flat number for the decade.
• Tyres are an open war: several suppliers competing, no control tyre, and a genuine choice at the start of a leg.
• There is no restart rule. Retirement is retirement. The next-day restart does not exist for another three decades.
• 1973-1976 has no drivers' title to chase, and 1977-78 score on the FIA Cup's own table with its own caps, rather than inheriting a later championship's points.

The 1977-78 detail is the kind of thing this project treats as load-bearing. A game that quietly awards a world drivers' championship in 1975 has told you it did not look.

Playing it

You start here, as a privateer with a day job, a debt-bought car and a borrowed co-driver. The season is not handed to you: you build a programme out of a global calendar, and entry fees, start money, date clashes and the cost of getting to Kenya are all real decisions. Winning a makes title is not available to you for years. Getting to the finish of one 5,000 km event, with the car intact and the bank still speaking to you, is the early game.

The other eras

• Group B, 1982-1986: 200 cars to homologate, 500 hp, and a ban that arrives within hours of a crash.
• Group A to the World Rally Car, 1987-2016: 5,000-car homologation, then the kit formula that ended it.
• The modern era, 2017 onward: aero, hybrid, and a €345,000 cost cap.
• Every rally management game, ranked: including which ones cover this decade.
• Rally Dynasty vs Motorsport Manager.