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Rallying in Poland
The popularity of rallies in Poland has grown rapidly over the past few years. Initially, rally spectators were only a limited group of the greatest enthusiasts, nowadays rallying arouses nationwide interest. Such metamorphosis of rallying popularity would not have been possible without a rapid growth of an automotive market in Poland.
What must be emphasized here is the remarkable and evident contribution of Krzysztof Ho³owczyc, who is recognized as a promoter of rallying in Poland. His spectacular results in the European and Polish Rally Championship have won him enormous numbers of supporters. They have also attracted the attention of many people from all over the country to rallying. Ho³owczyc has been chosen the Best Polish Sportsman of 1997 which obviously reflects the extent of popularity he has achieved.
According to a research carried out by BAT in October 2001 including 1500 respondents, Ho³owczyc is recognized by 52% of the Polish population. According to other surveys he has always been placed amongst the 10 most popular Poles.
Nowadays, rallying is one of the most popular sports in Poland, with an annual public of ca 2 million, watching drivers live at the special stages. Each round of the Polish Rally Championship is directly observed by no less than 100,000 spectators. Motorsport takes 4th place in the 10 most popular sports watched on Polish TV, with the audience of ca 5 million (according to: EXPERTMONITOR “Press” 06/07.2001). Polish Rally Championship events are becoming increasingly popular in the national media, with a resulting outbreak of rally-oriented websites, which shows the vast potential of motorsport in terms of its expanding public. Live broadcast of Warszawski Rally by TVP1 shows a positive change in the media interest, which could earlier be observed on commercial channels only. Polish rally events are also popular abroad, the German DSF Channel regularly presents consecutive rounds of the championship.
Motorsport is unique as far as its emotions and entertainment are concerned, they cannot be compared with those associated with any other sports. This is because of very strong identification of a spectator with a rally driver, since driving license owners watching rally events tend to believe that being a professional rally driver lies within their capabilities and does not necessarily require years of hard training so typical of other sports.
As a result of creation of such an emotional bond between the drivers and the spectators, rally events become the optimum environment for advertising. Rallying symbolizes courage, dynamism, technical progress, agility and consequently rally drivers are perfect for the purpose of endorsement advertising. Similar level of efficiency in sports based advertising has possibly been achieved only by Red Bull with its well-targeted campaign accompanied by the success of Adam Ma³ysz.
Is rallying popular?
A sounding conducted for a new rally magazine “WRC” which will be introduced at the beginning of 2002, shows that rallying is one of the most popular sports in Poland. A representative group of 1,000 Poles was asked a question “What kind of sports are you most interested in?” with rallying as one of the possible answers. Amongst the people questioned, 24.8% declared no interest in sports whatsoever. Rallying has been chosen the number 1 by 3.5% of the respondents who declared to be interested in sports. That is a better result than in the case of speedway, ski jumping or cycling, notwithstanding all of them being strongly promoted by the media.
According to the research the average rally fan is a 20 - 29-year-old male with a High School education and salaries above average. Rallying is the most popular in Ma³opolska and Dolny Œl¹sk regions.
The Sounding has been made by IQS AND QUANT GROUP.
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