Motorsport Ireland president Aiden Harper says changes to the requirements to host a potential Irish round of the World Rally Championship now make it feasible for a trio of venues to anchor the event on a rotating basis.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Irish motorsport's governing body revealed that rather than settling on a single winning bid, as had been anticipated, the three regions which had been in contention to provide the location for the WRC's service park - Kerry, Limerick, and the South East region, based out of Waterford - would take turns to host for the years 2025-27.
Last week, Harper had indicated to RTÉ Sport that moving the event from place to place each year would not be ideal because of the "incredible infrastructural build in a service park when you look at all the requirements that are needed".
But speaking to RTÉ Sport following Tuesday's confirmation that the three locations would host on a rotating basis, Harper said the outlook had shifted in favour of that model.
"There was no differentiation between the three of them in our final scoring matrix system. We couldn't actually pick one winner so our job was made very hard," he said.
"So we worked with the motorsport promoter in WRC to see would it be possible to move around three locations in three years. It has been done in other countries and that's the model that we went with.
"There are new changes coming in which we've just learned about in the last week. WRC will take the new change in 2025 where some of the team structures will become smaller and will become more mobile and some of the infrastructure that will be required won't be as required as before, so that actually helped our thinking process when it came up to the final crunch and that was only released to us late last week."
Ireland last hosted a round of the WRC in 2009 and the success of the bid for 2025 onwards is wholly dependent on funding from the Irish government.
"Without funding this project stops," Harper said, adding that 1 March would be the deadline before which they would need to know whether the required level of funding will be made available.
"Our ask is €15m over three years with a payback of €300m, so that's €100m per region.
"The funding is absolutely imperative to this. The soundbites that we got from the various sitting ministers, ministers of state etc that we met on our trip over the last week or so have been extremely positive; local governments, county councils telling us that 'we will help to get this'.
"Our funding is going through due process at the moment like any funding would be but we're getting very positive soundbites out from that."
Long-time Irish rally co-driver Paul Nagle, who is affiliated with Killarney Motor Club, spoke of his satisfaction at the rotating host model from the perspective of the Kerry region bid.
"Very happy obviously, bringing motorsport to Ireland at the highest level is the most important thing," he said.
"We're a small community here in Ireland so when we have the world championship here, it doesn't really matter where it goes.
"Yes, we were looking for the three years but ourselves and Limerick now have the south-west. They'll be using some of the Kerry stages and we'll be using some of the Limerick stages, so it's going to be in the county for two of the three years.
"We have to be happy, we have to be pleased but it has been a massive effort from all of the team, especially for all the lads in Kerry Motor Club."
