Rallycross: From Lydden Hill to the Electric Disaster and Back | Klara Andersson and Andrew Coley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGvxfAlvco4

Rallycross is one of motorsport’s best-kept secrets. Wheel-to-wheel racing on mixed tarmac and gravel surfaces, cars with 600 horsepower launching 0 to 100km/h faster than a Formula 1 car, all packed into a three-minute sprint. And it has had one of the most turbulent decades of any series on the calendar. On this Rallycross special, Presenter Andrew Coley and RX driver Klara Andersson join us to chat about what makes this sport so special.

Rallycross has been through more in the last decade than most sports manage in fifty years. This episode tells that whole story, from the very beginning to where the sport sits right now in 2026, with two guests who’ve experienced it from very different angles.

Andrew Coley was the official commentator and presenter for every single round of the FIA World Rallycross Championship from its inaugural season in 2014 through to 2020. He covered the manufacturer boom, the title fights, the controversy, the highs and the lows, and he’s watched the sport from the commentary box with the same level of passion he brought to every broadcast. Klara Andersson is a Swedish rallycross driver who came through the national ranks to make history in 2022 as both the first permanent female competitor in World RX and the first woman to stand on the top-flight podium. She’s been racing at the sharp end of the sport ever since.

Where Rallycross Came From

The sport began in Britain on 4 February 1967 at Lydden Hill in Kent, and the origin story is a good one. ABC Weekend TV producer Robert Reed had been trying to cover the RAC Rally for television but found it almost impossible to make compelling viewing. His idea was to shrink it down, combining the flat-out driving of autocross with the mixed surfaces of rally, compressing seven days of competition into seven minutes of television. The first event was won by Vic Elford in a Porsche 911. The format took off quickly. Within a couple of years it had spread to the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and by 1973 there was a European Championship. The FIA got involved formally in 1976, and a proper structure started to take shape.

The sport’s early character owed a lot to Scandinavia. Sweden, Norway and Finland took rallycross seriously from the beginning, and names like Martin Schanche, the six-time European champion known as Norway’s Michael Schumacher, came to define what the sport could be. The late 1980s were the first real heyday, partly because the Group B cars banned from the World Rally Championship in 1986 found a new home in Division 2 of the European Championship. The Audi Quattro S1, Peugeot 205 T16, Lancia Delta S4 and Ford RS200 all turned up and produced some of the most spectacular racing the sport had ever seen.

By the mid-1990s the Group B cars had gone, costs were rising and the series went quieter. For much of the late 1990s and 2000s it was a niche sport that held genuine fan loyalty but couldn’t break through to a wider audience.

2014 to 2018: The Glory Years

Everything changed in 2014 when the FIA elevated the championship to World Championship status. The series rebranded as the FIA World Rallycross Championship, IMG Motorsport came in as promoter, and the sport started attracting serious manufacturer attention.

Over the five seasons from 2014 to 2018, Volkswagen, Audi, Peugeot and Ford all committed factory or factory-supported programmes. Petter Solberg, who had won the World Rally Championship in 2003, became the inaugural World RX champion in 2014. Sebastian Loeb, with nine WRC titles to his name, raced on the same grid. Mattias Ekström built and ran his own Audi-backed team and fought at the front throughout the period. Johan Kristoffersson won back-to-back titles in 2017 and 2018 driving for Petter Solberg’s Volkswagen-backed PSRX team, and the level of competition at the top was about as high as the sport had ever seen.

The venues were electric. Holjes in Sweden regularly drew 35,000 spectators. The cars were producing 600 horsepower and accelerating from 0 to 100 kilometres per hour in 2.5 seconds, quicker than a Formula 1 car. The racing was close, chaotic and completely unpredictable.

Andrew Coley was at the microphone for all of it. He describes the 2019 season as the best he ever commentated on, with genuinely open finals where you could not predict the winner when the lights went out. The paddock was full of names that fans of WRC, Formula 1 and DTM all recognised, but the sport had also developed its own stars in the Hansen family, Andreas Bakkerud, Timur Timerzyanov and others who had built their entire careers in rallycross.

Then, ahead of the 2019 season, the manufacturers started pulling out. The transition to electric was on the horizon and nobody was going to invest in the old technology when the rules were about to change entirely. The plan had been for a hybrid or electric category in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it back, and the series ran reduced seasons in 2020 and 2021 with smaller fields and less fanfare.

The Electric Era: 2022 and What Followed

The fully electric RX1e class launched in 2022. In terms of performance, the numbers were still impressive. The Kreisel-supplied powertrain produced around 500 kilowatts and the cars could hit 100 kilometres per hour in under two seconds. The format also changed, adding a SuperPole qualifying shootout that gave the series a different kind of spectacle.

Klara Andersson joined the CE Dealer Team in 2022 as the first permanent female driver in the championship’s history. Her teammate was Niclas Gronholm, son of double WRC champion Marcus Gronholm. The team made a point of building around gender equality, and Andersson delivered results from the beginning. At the fifth round of the season, held in Portugal at Montalegre, she became the first woman ever to stand on a World RX podium, finishing third. She would follow that with a heat win in Hong Kong in 2023, another first.

But the series was struggling. The transition to electric had lost the manufacturers that had come in for the petrol era. Fan interest dropped. Grids got smaller. And then, in July 2023, something happened that crystallised all of the problems at once.

The Lancia Fire, Lydden Hill, 2023

Special ONE Racing had arrived at the 2023 season with two cars that turned heads. French driver Guerlain Chicherit had built a rallycross car around the bodyshell of a Lancia Delta Integrale, complete with a Martini-style livery echoing the Delta’s legendary Group A WRC era. Sebastian Loeb was signed to drive the sister car. The cars ran a 680 horsepower electric powertrain and were visually and historically one of the most striking things rallycross had seen in years.

At Lydden Hill, for the British round of the 2023 championship, a battery fire broke out in one of the cars at around 8:43 on the Friday morning while it was charging in the paddock. The fire spread to the second car, then to the team’s transporter. Nine fire engines attended. Both cars and all the team’s equipment were destroyed. Team members escaped without injury, but only just.

The FIA cancelled the top-class racing for the weekend while they investigated. The investigation confirmed the fire had started in the battery pack, but the cause was unclear enough that the championship could not continue with the RX1e cars at that event. Loeb called what he witnessed brutal. The repercussions went beyond just the team. The series’ credibility was damaged at a moment when electric motorsport more broadly was already facing hard questions. The remainder of the 2023 season was completed using RX2e cars as replacements. Special ONE Racing did not participate in the Hong Kong finale.

Recovery: Battle of Technologies 2024

The FIA’s response for 2024 was creative. Rather than abandoning electric entirely, the championship introduced what it called the Battle of Technologies, allowing both RX1e electric cars and internal combustion RX1 cars to compete in the same class. It was the first time a major motorsport championship had run both powertrain types head-to-head on equal terms.

Johan Kristoffersson won the 2024 title in a petrol car running on biofuel. Over the course of the season the two powertrain types were reasonably matched, which was itself a significant achievement. Klara Andersson continued with the CE Dealer Team in the electric category, recorded a career-best championship finish of sixth overall, and came within a very small margin of winning on home soil at Holjes.

2025 and the End of World Championship Status

Despite the progress of 2024, the championship continued to face problems with grid numbers and commercial sustainability. Red Bull and KW25, who had been the series promoters since 2021, withdrew at the end of 2024. The FIA took over promotion of the series in-house.

By 2025, the top-class grid had shrunk to as few as four cars at some events. The World Championship’s final round took place in Istanbul, Turkey. Johan Kristoffersson won his eighth world title. Hansen Motorsport had pulled out before the finale due to budget constraints. It was a sobering way for the World Championship era to end.

2026: The European Championship and a New Beginning

In September 2025, the FIA announced a full structural overhaul. The World Championship was wound down. The FIA European Rallycross Championship, which had been the series’ top tier before 2014, returned as the pinnacle of the sport. Electric powertrains were dropped from the top category. Internal combustion was back. Free-to-watch global livestreaming continued.

The results have been striking. At the opening round of the 2026 European Championship in Riga, Latvia in May, 30 RX1 Supercars lined up on the grid. That was a 750 per cent increase from the smallest grids seen in 2025. The championship introduced quarter-finals for the first time because there were simply too many drivers to go straight to semis. Kristoffersson won, but all four qualifying sessions across the weekend were won by different drivers in different cars. As Andreas Bakkerud put it, it felt like the fans had never really left, they had just been waiting for the right moment to come back.

New classes have also been introduced. RX4 brings in Rally4-specification cars, giving club-level competitors and developing nations a route into the championship. RX5 provides another entry point using Cross Car specifications. The calendar includes six rounds at venues that carry real weight in the sport’s history, including Lydden Hill, Holjes, and Lohéac.

The FIA has also confirmed a Rallycross World Cup event in Jakarta, Indonesia in December 2026, the first international rallycross competition outside Europe in recent years.

Looking to 2028

The long-term plan is significant. When the FIA World Rally Championship introduces its new WRC27 technical regulations in 2027, those same regulations will be made applicable to rallycross from 2028. The shared chassis architecture means a constructor could in theory run concurrent programmes in both WRC and rallycross without building entirely separate cars. The FIA has stated clearly that the goal is to bring back the World Rallycross Championship with full grids and meaningful manufacturer interest, and the 2028 regulations are the platform to do it.

It is not a short-term fix. It requires investment, trust and time. But the 2026 season has demonstrated that the appetite is there when the conditions are right.

Klara Andersson: The Story So Far

Klara Andersson was born on 29 February 2000 in Löberöd, Sweden. She comes from a motorsport family. Her father Håkan raced in the Swedish Rallycross Championship. Her older sister Magda won events in the FIA European Rallycross Championship, even her mum has competed. Klara started karting at age seven and competed for six years internationally, winning multiple regional titles.

At thirteen, she stopped racing. A junior rallycross class she had been planning to enter disappeared, and she was too young for the senior categories. She spent five years playing football, watching her sister race and going to school. In 2018 she got back in a car and in 2020 she was runner-up in the Swedish Junior Rallycross Championship, losing by 0.18 of a second. In 2021 she entered the senior class against a field of over fifty drivers and won the Swedish title outright.

That result opened the door to the international stage. She made two appearances in the RX2e feeder series, finishing fourth on debut at Spa-Francorchamps. Then came the call to join CE Dealer Team for 2022 as a full-time World RX competitor. The rest is on the record.

Four World RX podiums. First woman ever on a World RX podium. First woman to win a World RX heat session. First permanent female competitor in the championship’s history. In 2025 she joined Carl Cox Motorsport for the FIA Extreme H World Cup alongside team principal Timo Scheider.

She has said many times that her gender was not an issue in her career, that in Sweden the culture around women in motorsport has always been more open than elsewhere, and that what she wants is to keep performing and let that do the talking. The young girls who started coming up to her after Portugal 2022, saying they wanted to race because of what she had done, became a significant part of how she understands her role.

Andrew Coley: The Voice of World RX

Andrew Coley is from East Sussex, England. Before commentary, he was a motorsport competitor himself, a rally driver who won his class at the national level and has described everything from frozen lake driving in Norway to stages in the Western Sahara. He moved into instruction, then manufacturer product launches, then television presenting, starting at Eurosport.

He joined the FIA World Rallycross Championship in 2014 as the official presenter and lead English-language commentator, a role he held through every single World RX event from the inaugural round to 2020. He is the only person to have commentated on every World Rallycross event held during that period, totalling 71 events across 24 venues.

His style became well known within the sport, high-energy, genuinely passionate, and with the knowledge of someone who has actually driven the disciplines he covers. The word “mega” became something of a signature. He has also covered Extreme E, RallyX Nordic, the Isle of Man TT and Nitrocross. He describes 2019 as the best World RX season he ever watched, and his analysis of the sport’s decline and potential recovery comes from a place of real attachment to what it was at its peak.

Episode Themes

History and Heritage - Where the sport came from, how it got on television in 1967, its growth through Scandinavia, and what the European Championship looked like before it became the World Championship.

The Manufacturer Era - What it meant to have Volkswagen, Audi, Peugeot and Ford all competing seriously, the names it brought onto the grid, and why those years are still the benchmark most people in the sport use.

The Electric Era - The ambition behind the switch to electric, the practical problems it created, and the honest conversation about whether the timing was right.

The Lancia Fire - A straightforward account of what happened at Lydden Hill in 2023, what it meant for the series, and how the teams and organisers responded.

The Recovery - The Battle of Technologies, the 2026 European Championship relaunch, and why a grid of 30 cars at the opening round felt genuinely significant to people inside the sport.

The Road to 2028 - What the WRC27 regulations mean for rallycross, the possibility of manufacturer crossover programmes, and what a rebuilt World Championship might look like.

Women in Motorsport - Klara Andersson talks honestly about her experience as a woman in a male-dominated sport, the culture in Sweden that made it easier, and what her visibility has meant to younger girls wanting to race.

Where To Get The Show

Amazon - Audio Only

Apple - Audio Only

Spotify - Audio/Video

YouTube - Audio/Video