World's best set to return for rally

The roads of Northland will once again feature the world's top rally drivers and cars when the World Rally Championship (WRC) returns here in 2010.
The WRC organising committee has issued a directive "to take rallying back to the people" - simplifying matters for 2010 Rally of New Zealand organiser Willard Martin, who said the FIA's message made it possible to send the Rally of New Zealand north again after a break of four years.
Plans being finalised this week will see the first of the rally's three days of special stages run on Northland roads, with the second and third days held south of Auckland, mainly on Waikato roads.
"We'll have the WRC up here on May 7, next year and run stages in the morning and afternoon, and run a remote service park in Whangarei at the same place as we use for the Asia-Pacific Rally," he said.
The service park at Whangarei's Town Basin will give the Auckland-based rally a better opportunity to be seen by Northlanders. The rally will move away from its previous base at Mystery Creek, south of Hamilton, to give the event access to Auckland's bigger population base.
While local businesses will expect some Auckland spectators to follow the cars north during Friday's competition, the cars and their crews won't stay overnight. Instead they will be returning to an Auckland central city location - with a space at Queens Wharf expected to be confirmed as the event's headquarters and one of its service parks.
"With the move back to Auckland, we have the opportunity to take the rally route both north and south of our largest city, offering excellent spectator viewing," Martin said.
The organiser said, while plans were still in their infancy, they  would be careful to make sure  there  was no overlap with the Asia-Pacific Rally of Whangarei - the country's second biggest -  being held next year on July 3 and 4.
"We're still planning the WRC event and we still aren't sure how many stages we'll run [up north]. But at this point we'd like to include separate stages for each event, to avoid roads getting overused, so each road only gets used for one rally every year," he said.
Martin has already spoken to the councils affected and, while it is only early days yet, he said the preliminary discussions had been very helpful for planning purposes.
The Maungaturoto "co-op" - an organisation of Northland rally fans that help to co-ordinate much of the legwork of the rally - has been brought out of mothballs and will meet tonight to discuss the rally.
The global recession has forced Subaru - one of the mainstays of the competition for 20 years - and Suzuki out of the WRC series. But Citroen and Ford have  confirmed their participation for next year, meaning the competition will go ahead but it may be somewhat smaller than contests in the past. In 2008, the sport's governing body, the FIA, decided that New Zealand would share its WRC event with Australia - making the Rally of New Zealand a biennial
event.
The agreement between Rally New Zealand and the Auckland City Council covers the next three events, meaning the WRC could be back in Northland again in 2012 and 2014.