World Rallycross has a positive future in EVs, says team boss Jansson

Micke Jansson, the CEO of PWR Group talks to us about the delays to the WRX 2025 calendar and how the sport can overcome its current difficulties

This weekend should have marked the opening round of the 2025 World Rallycross Championship. After all, an official calendar was published at the end of 2024, with the team’s 11 full-time drivers, five teams and their mix of electric and petrol-powered cars set to head to Canada for the championship’s inaugural ice race on January 23.

Until they weren’t.

Despite last year’s announcement that an official calendar was in place for 2025, the sport’s governing body, the FIA, split with the World RX promoter, World Rallycross Promoter GmbH at the end of the season.

The FIA has not made the thinking behind its decision public. However, it was evident to even the most casual observer that the sport was in decline as factory-backed teams withdrew to race elsewhere and the numbers of spectators in the grandstands grew smaller.

EVs in trouble?

The more cynical enthusiast may also suggest that World RX’s decision to introduce electric cars under the ‘RXe’ category proved another headache. After all, the motorsport world was RX crazy in the mid-2010s. Why swap the popping and banging from a 570bhp turbocharged ICE, for a silent – although, 670bhp producing – RXe car?

The EV naysayers appeared vindicated when the entire championship was abandoned in 2023 after just two rounds, when a battery fire wiped out both the SpecialONE team’s Lancia Delta Evo-e cars and caused serious damage throughout the paddock. It returned in 2024 with the EV v ICE ‘Battle of the Technologies’ – where Johan Kristofferson’s petrol VW Polo took a record-breaking seventh driver’s title ahead of Kevin Hansen’s Peugeot 208 RX1e.

There’s no doubt that result, the fire and a lack of support from car makers have played a part in the sport’s current lack of a promoter and official calendar. But can World RX’s current difficulties be entirely blamed on the FIA’s ambition to go electric?

Not according to Micke Jansson, the CEO of PWR Group. The Swede, whose outfit powers the CE Dealer Team by Volvo Construction Equipment believes that a wider lack of interest in motorsport outside of Formula 1 is what truly matters.

‘Motorsport is cyclical’

“Throughout my career as an entrepreneur and a racing driver when I was younger, I noticed that you see cycles in both sports and business,” he explained to EV Powered.

“Even in Formula 1, there’s been some difficult times with teams going bust. I think Drive to Survive really helped to bring the sport to a wider audience, and I can’t think of any other motorsport that has done that successfully.”

Jansson says that the days of teams going racing just because they could are long gone, and that’s not down to what’s powering the cars but the need for a sound business reason.

“PWR is involved with World Rallycross, because the sport acts as a vehicle to help our partners make the transition to EV, for example,” he continued. “Companies like Volvo Construction Equipment has invested heavily in sustainability as it recognises the need to transform its products, excavators, and haulers to greener solutions such as EVs.

“Our activity in Rallycross can be used to address sustainability issues and attract partners into the motorsport ecosystem, because you can’t finance a team, a championship, or an operation if you don’t add value. These days, we can’t just rely on saying ‘our championship is so good’ or ‘if we had 500 more horsepower, then that would solve all of our problems’ because it won’t.”

‘I’m positive we can improve our championship’

Despite the R&D difficulties faced by the CE Dealer Team and World RX’s other all-electric competitors, Jansson explained that the enforced break for teams and drivers by having neither a promoter nor a calendar has proved more of a blessing than a curse.

“While the FIA hasn’t made it public about why they moved away from the World Rallycross promoter, they definitely made it clear that they wanted a change,” Jansson continued. “I think from a championship point of view, we also needed to improve on several things, for example how we work with media rights, and team access to them.

“We’ve had some good conversations with the FIA about what they want to do for the championship, and what we can do to make things happen from a team side. Obviously there are processes and deadlines. We’re pushing what we think is necessary, and they have their agenda.

“All in all, I think we work well together, so I’m positive about solving the problems we face and making improvements to our championship.”

Despite the current delay, Jansson predicts that World RX’s current approach of “taking a step back, to make a step forward” will see a new promoter announced by the end of February 2025.

“The FIA’s tender for the World RX promoter closes at the end of January, so I hope we’ll have everything in place including technical regulations and a calendar by the end of February,” he said. “We haven’t announced any drivers yet, but we should do so around then, too. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to go racing afterwards…”

Before the flag drops at the 2025 World RX season curtainraiser, Jansson hopes that during the sport’s enforced hiatus, the FIA has had time to address the performance difference between the RX1 Supercar, and its ICE counterpart.

“When the FIA announced that World Rallycross would become all-electric, it was at a time when the car industry was all-in with EVs, so I don’t think the regulation was properly evaluated, especially when it came to the ‘Battle of the Technologies’ idea,” he concluded. “Teams running the older ICE Supercar were racing using the old regulations, which were much more open.

“With EVs, things were more restricted. For example, you can’t test as much as you’d like to, because the lifetime of the batteries is equal to the number of charging cycles. What’s more, an EV is about 160 kilograms heavier than an ICE because of the batteries. Even if you have around 120bhp extra and more torque than a petrol or diesel car, it’s physically impossible to compete with a lighter vehicle.”

“Still, this is all good storytelling because it reflects our market.”

If such discrepancies can be ironed out, and the FIA and teams deliver on their upbeat messages around a new promoter and calendar, there’s still plenty of scope for World RX to race into a positive electrified future.

When the FIA confirms the 2025 World RX calendar along with the participating teams and drivers, be sure to return to EVPowered for a full season preview.