Sport on the Internet

THE WORLD Rally Championship reaches round 12 this week with the French leg, the Corsica Rally, scheduled to start on Friday. However, if you expect to be able to read up about it online in the week or two leading up to the race, you could be in for some mouse- clicking of RSI- inducing proportions.

Rallyzone.com, "the best rally magazine on the internet", for example, is not particularly good for previews. Not if you want to read them a week before events are due to start. The links to races in its calendar only become live when events start, so it is a case of scouring the news and features pages to pick up information before that.

The vague promise that "some live coverage of some official events" is given online, but that is as specific as it gets, despite more clicking around the site, and at the weekend there was no way of telling whether, or in what format, live coverage of Corsica is scheduled. The site does hint that it is in the process of upgrading but, as this is an ongoing process for any site, it is difficult to tell what effect the upgrade will have - the only thing it mentions is the addition of an archive of last years' reports.

During and after races, things look up, with general previews (at last), day-by-day text reports and final results. The provision of stage and intermediate results would be a welcome addition. The general news pages, however, are good, with full details of planned changes for the 2002 British Rally Championship.

Sports.com Rally is also a decent site for news stories. Usefully, it has items on its main news page stretching back further than Rallyzone.com. For example, an item about the 2001 British rally championship being cancelled for the first time in 44 years, after the fifth round in July because of the foot and mouth epidemic, was easy to find. So, too, the news that next month's final round of the world championship, the Rally of Great Britain, is still expected to go ahead on 22 November.

The results section becomes confusing, however. On the 2001 schedule, results have been updated only as far as mid-June. Clicking on results for individual races in the world championship is an option. But this gets deeply confusing if you click on Corsica, as the site gives the impression that the Rally has already finished. Cross-checking with date-bearing news stories only deepened the confusion.

I turned to WorldRallying.com to clear up the confusion. It reaffirmed that the rally was due to start on Friday. The site has an uncluttered navigation system that quickly allows a user to decide what sort of rally information to investigate: UK, USA, European, world, Asian or desert raids. Within each section, new stories, previews and links to pages with full schedules and up to date results are available with mercifully minimal mouse clicks.

A rally with a difference, The Inca Trail, started on 6 October in Rio. Daily reports on the mix of vintage vehicles and modern 4x4s undertaking a 15,000-mile round trip through South America can be found on the hero.org.uk web site, its own-domain site www.incatrail.org is not yet online.

sport@andyoldfield.com

Site Addresses

Rallyzone.com

www.rallyzone.com

Sports.com Rally

www.sports.com/rally

World Rallying

www.worldrallying.com

Inca Trail

www.hero.org.uk/inca/index.html

Copyright 2001 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.