FIA taking over full management of European Truck Racing Championship

The FIA European Truck Racing Championship is a fun enough series that I may eventually decide to cover it race by race on Turning Fortune, but I mostly consider it a pleasant diversion, and the FIA probably does as well. It is certainly interesting that the FIA wants to take over soup-to-nuts management of the series rather than just sanctioning it. This suggests that it’s not the most commercially successful racing series out there, and the FIA doesn’t want to lose it altogether.

This isn’t the federation’s first move of this kind, though; last year it took ownership of the FIA World Rallycross Championship, too. Now, it has enlisted the World Rally Championship promoter group to help with that, and they’re getting close to finding a new commercial rights holder for WRC that may take rallycross over as well. Maybe the truck racing thing is a similar sort of transitional stewardship arrangement. But if not, and the Ben Sulayem administration is trying to diversify its revenue streams away from Formula 1 dependency by getting commercially involved in racing, it’s surely going to run back into the legal trouble that explains why, for example, Formula 1’s commercial rights are held independently from its sanctioning rights.