However, I don’t see why FOM don’t let fans put highlights videos and amateur footage on the internet. I can see why FOM wouldn’t like live streams but I don’t understand their problem with vids after the event.

I agree with you on the politics side of things though. It could well be that F1 is much more in the spotlight than the WRC that we don’t see their politics so much, but even if you look closer, as Raikkonen says, politics gets in the way of racing much less than in F1.

Probably F1 is more corporate on the whole than rallying, but F1 is contested by thirteen (we hope) full-time, completely professional outfits. The World Rally Championship has fewer full-time entrants and a greater diversity of the organisation and quality of teams. F1 teams are chasing sponsor deals in the region of millions of dollars; in that sense it pays to be corporate and respectable. And again, with the TV fees commanded by FOM it’s no wonder the broadcasters don’t want fan footage cluttering up the Internet. Fan interaction I’ll give you; rally drivers do seem to be better than their F1 counterparts but FOTA are actively working on this.

On politics, I think the main difference between rallying and F1 is that F1′s dirty laundry gets aired out in the open far more than it does in rallying, due to the global popularity of F1 and the fact that you have scores of full-time journalists making a living on F1 alone. Rallying has been affected by its own internal disputes on regulations and so forth, but coverage of that is largely confined to the specialist press; open your average edition of Motorsport News and you’ll see that it’s not all sweetness and light in rallying either.