The World Rally Championship is back. The Monte Carlo rally kicked off this week, marking the beginning of the 2025 WRC season. Videos emerging from the stages so far prove one thing: the top level of stage rally is as wildly entertaining as ever.
The Monte Carlo rally is known for its sketchy tarmac surfaces, which can evolve from dry pavement, to muddy ruts, to sheets of ice in the span of just a few corners. Reports from the official FIA YouTube channel from day one of the event showed just that, with drivers pushing to their absolute limits to find every single second.
The first few stages of the event took place at night, with eight-time champion Sébastien Ogier winning the first two before narrowly avoiding a nasty crash on stage three, which left his car hanging off the side of a ditch. That allowed last year's championship winner Thierry Neuville to take the overall lead.
As great as this year's competition is setting out to be, it's the wild footage coming from those night stages that has us most enraptured. Specifically, video from stage three, where cars are flying up the side of a mountain on a switchback road lined by spectators, paints an incredibly bright picture for the future of this sport.
These kinds of scenes hark back to the Group B era, where masses of spectators would risk their lives to get close to the competition cars as they flew down stages. While these modern machines might not have as much horsepower, they're just as quick down a stage, and even more entertaining to watch.
Source: FIA World Rally Championship / YouTube
