Why gearboxes cost £200k

The line, and the number behind it

"Gearboxes cost £200k because they do" is a line from this project's own brand notes. It is also very nearly true, and the near-miss is the interesting part.

The sourced figure: a works World Rally Car of the 2000s was commonly cited at €600,000 to €1,000,000 a car, and the sequential gearbox alone at about €200,000. Not the transmission programme. Not the spares package. One gearbox, in one car, in one era.

Which is exactly why the number cannot be written into the game as a constant. In 1975 a works gearbox was not €200,000. In 2013 a customer R5 car, the whole car and race-ready, was capped by the FIA at €180,000, so a €200,000 gearbox would have been a joke. A single figure is right for one decade and absurd in the other four.

So parts are priced as fractions, and rated in kilometres

Every part in the game carries two numbers: a price as a fraction of the car's value, and a life in competitive kilometres. That way the gearbox for a 1975 privateer's hatchback and the gearbox for a 2005 works car are the same rule, and both come out roughly right.

Here is the gearbox row as the game actually ships it:

Apply that to a €1M-era works car and the works gearbox lands at €180,000. The sourced number was about €200,000. Close enough that the model was not built to hit it, and the fact that it does is the reason to trust the rest of the table.

Life anchors sourced from period practice: a 1970s works gearbox about 700 km, a differential about 900, a set of dampers about 400 gravel km, driveshafts about 500, a turbo about 1,200. Price fractions and the reliability and pace trades are designed.

A kilometre is not a kilometre

This is where a naive parts model falls over. Seven hundred competitive kilometres means something different in each decade, because the sport's seasons changed shape completely. From the game's own measured anchors, taken off hand-read season data:

So a standard 700 km gearbox is most of one 1985 rally and two whole modern rounds. A used one, at 400 km, will not see the end of a single event in the Group B era and will do a comfortable modern weekend. The part did not change. The road did.

The same correction runs through everything else the game measures in distance. A full 1985 season is more than twice the competitive mileage of 2015, so driver development is normalised per season rather than per kilometre. A flat per-kilometre rate would hand the Group B era a generation of superhumans and the modern era a generation of nobodies.

What actually breaks

The failure list is remarkably stable across seventy years: gearboxes, driveshafts and constant-velocity joints, dampers and suspension arms, turbos, differentials, head gaskets, and punctures, far worse on gravel than on tarmac. Sump guards take repeated hits and exist to protect the engine and gearbox from the ones that would end the rally.

The classic privateer spares load is therefore a complete gearbox, driveshafts, dampers, arms, a radiator, an alternator, belts, discs and pads, wheels and tyres, body panels, a lamp pod and fluids. Under-packing that list is the most common way a privateer campaign ends early. As the research brief for this project puts it, a €15,000 shortfall in spares is the most expensive €15,000 you never spent.

The bill is only half of it: who fixes it, and when

The same broken gearbox is a different problem in different decades, and that is a rule change rather than a difficulty setting.

• Chase cars, 1973-1986. Service is strung along the route. Overnight rebuilds at the roadside are normal; works crews of the period could change a gearbox in well under half an hour. Almost anything can be put right between legs.
• Designated service vans, 1987-2003. Still route-based, but scheduled. A gearbox still goes overnight; a full engine now waits a week in the shop between events.
• Central service park, 2004 onward. The cloverleaf format loops every stage from one park, with timed windows, commonly 15, 40 and 45 minutes, and penalties for overrunning. This is the change that ended roadside service, and with it the era in which a determined crew could rebuild anything anywhere.

The modern sport proves the point from the other end. Rally1's hybrid units were dropped for 2025 in part because damaged ones cost too much to put right, after the supplier required any unit that had logged three shocks over 15G, or a single one over 25G, to go back to the factory for a full strip and rebuild. Repair economics still write regulations.

The decision this creates

None of the three grades is the right answer, which is the point. A works gearbox costs 18% of the car and is the cheapest option per kilometre, if you survive long enough to use the kilometres. A used one costs 3%, gets you to the start line this month, and raises your failure rate by 40% on a surface that is already trying to break it. In this game no option is allowed to be better on every axis; a choice that wins on all of them is not a choice, and there are tests that fail the build over it.

What the player sees is exact money and a described risk. The ledger says what the part costs. It does not tell you the probability that it lets go on the sixth stage, because danger in this game is stated in words and never as a percentage.

Read next

• How the 1986 ban is modelled: the other half of "the rulebook is the antagonist".
• Group A to the World Rally Car: the era those €200,000 gearboxes lived in.
• Rally Dynasty vs Rally Mechanic Simulator: the same parts, from under the car instead of over the ledger.
• Every rally management game, ranked.