Skoda's Rocky Start In The WRC Was 25 Years Ago

Skoda isn’t necessarily the first name you think of when it comes to rallying. The manufacturer can’t claim huge numbers of world titles like Lancia and Citroen, or to have been part of a thrilling rivalry like Mitsubishi and Subaru. It hasn’t been a constant presence in the sport’s top flight like Ford or changed the game like Audi.

What Skoda is, however, is dedicated to the sport. 2024 marks Skoda’s 25th year fielding cars in the World Rally Championship, something it’s celebrating as the new season kicks off with the Monte Carlo Rally.

Rewind to the same event in 1999, and the first Skoda WRC car debuted - the Octavia. This was an era of huge manufacturer involvement - seven factory teams were fielding four-wheel drive turbo cars in the top class, with another three running bonkers, naturally-aspirated front-wheel drive machinery in the 2.0-Litre World Cup sub-category.

Against this competition, the Octavia was… not that great. Skoda only ran half of the 14 rounds that year, but even then, the team scored a grand total of six points. They ran the Octavia until midway through the 2003 season, its best result coming when Armin Schwarz took it to third place at the 2001 Safari Rally. Maybe things would improve with a switch to the shorter, more agile Fabia? Erm…

There’s no getting around it: the Fabia WRC fared even worse. The best the Skoda factory team could manage with it was sixth in Corsica in 2005, and at the end of that season, they pulled out. The Fabia would actually make some improvements as a privately-run car during 2006 and 2007, managing a couple of fifth-place finishes, but with a sole podium in seven years, the harsh truth is that Skoda’s dalliance with the very top class of the WRC wasn’t a success.

The thing is, there’s more to the WRC than the very top category. Directly below it, kind of a mudslinging, four-wheel drive equivalent of Formula 2, sits WRC-2, and its predecessor, the Super 2000 World Rally Championship. In 2009, Skoda returned to this top-but-one category, and things have gone rather better for them. Running various versions of the third-generation Fabia, the Skoda factory team won the championship every year from 2015 to 2019, with private entries running Fabias taking a few more titles since then.

For 2024, the latest version - the Fabia Rally2, introduced last year - will once again be looking for overall honours in WRC-2. It has a new emphasis on sustainability, too, running on carbon-neutral fuel and with certain biocomposite parts.

What impresses most is Skoda’s long-running commitment to supporting rallying, especially at more junior levels - they’ve been doing it for decades. Go back to the ’90s and cars like the Felicia and Favorit were formidable in the lower rungs of the Group A era. Even before that, the long-forgotten underdog that was the rear-engined 130 LR was able to beat far more powerful Group B machinery thanks to its simple, rugged nature. So perhaps Skoda deserves a bit more of a look-in as one of the great rallying names.