Rally Indonesia has stepped up its effort to gain a place in the World Rally Championship, with the organisers running a candidate event this September.
Indonesia last ran as a round of the WRC in 1996 and 1997 - with Carlos Sainz winning both events in a Ford Escort Cosworth and a Ford Escort WRC respectively. Officials from the event were present in Amman during last week’s Jordan Rally to promote the Makassar-based rally.
A spokesperson from the event said: “We believe Indonesia has a great deal to offer the WRC. We’re very excited about the candidate rally coming up and we think we have everything in place to run a very successful round of the series.”
Rally Indonesia has been included in the FIA Asia Pacific Rally Championship since 2005 and this will be its first season as a candidate event. The event is based in the capital city of South Sulawesi with the stages all running through sugarcane plantations on clay-based roads. While the climate is equatorial tropical, the organisers have taken the precaution of running the event in one of the driest months of the year - with temperatures of around 30 degrees expected.
One of the other key alterations the Rally Indonesia organisers have made for this season is the introduction of a new service park at the Trans Studio - the biggest indoor theme park in the world. Indonesia has the world’s fourth largest population at more than 220 million people and is the largest archipelago in the world, with 17,000 islands.