A Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 car competes in the WRC Central European Rally in 2023. Photo by Lukas Raich via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Oliver Solberg led Rally Chile Biobío from the opening loop to the finish and beat Sébastien Ogier by 16.6 seconds, which is the sort of result that normally gets filed under “young driver arrives.” Toyota filed it somewhere else entirely. The win was the GR Yaris Rally1’s 11th from 12 rounds this season, and it closed out the 2026 manufacturers’ championship with two rallies still unrun — a sixth consecutive title and a tenth overall, drawing the team level with Lancia on both counts.
Winning everything has an awkward side effect. Toyota has run out of people to beat. The only championship still open is the drivers’ title, and all three cars fighting over it come out of the same awning.
Solberg finally got a weekend that stayed clean
Friday did the heavy lifting. The Biobío stages ran wet, the gravel went greasy, and Solberg and Elliott Edmondson built a lead they never meaningfully surrendered — quickest on every stage but one across the weekend. Sunday’s Wolf Power Stage went the same way, by half a second from Elfyn Evans and six tenths from Sami Pajari.
Mud levels a rally for an unglamorous reason. When grip is low and fairly uniform, the penalty for cleaning the road shrinks and the weekend stops being about running order at all. It becomes a question of how hard a crew is willing to commit to a corner it cannot yet see, which is really a question of how far the driver trusts the notes coming out of the intercom. Solberg committed. Nobody else matched him.
Behind the leaders, Adrien Fourmaux delivered Hyundai’s only podium of the weekend, 16.7 seconds adrift of Ogier and 33.3 off the win. Pajari was fourth at 1m33.9s, Evans fifth at 2m22.3s, Esapekka Lappi sixth and Joshua McErlean seventh for M-Sport with a 10-second penalty sitting on his final classification. Thierry Neuville scored nothing at all. Takamoto Katsuta beached his car on Friday’s opening stage, restarted, and scraped three points out of Sunday with James Fulton alongside him — the tail end of a co-driver reshuffle that began with a broken collarbone in Paraguay. Yuki Yamamoto’s weekend ended in a heavy crash on Friday’s final stage.
One deflating tyre, and about a dozen points
Evans was sitting second and looking at 17 points when a tyre let go on the penultimate stage with no warning. The wheel change cost him more than two minutes and dropped him to fifth. That is the version you saw on the timing screen. The expensive part is less visible.
The 2026 championship pays 25-17-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 on the final classification, then five down to one for the Sunday-only standings, then five down to one on the Power Stage — 35 points available per weekend if you sweep the lot. Evans’s puncture landed on Sunday morning, so it did not simply cost him seven points on the overall. It also wiped out his Super Sunday score entirely. He took zero there, and rescued four by going second-fastest on the Power Stage. Final tally: 14 points from a weekend that was tracking toward 25 or more.
Ogier, meanwhile, lost the rally by 16.6 seconds and still walked away with 23 — second overall, the Super Sunday win, and a point on the Power Stage. Chile paid Solberg 34, Ogier 23, Fourmaux 18, Pajari 17 and Evans 14.
The number nobody is putting on the broadcast graphics
Strip the bonus points out of the drivers’ standings and the season reorders itself completely.
Counting only points scored on final classifications, Pajari has 182, Evans has 154 and Solberg has 124. On raw rally results, this is not a close championship — Pajari is 28 clear of Evans and 58 clear of Solberg. He has won three rallies on the bounce at Estonia, Finland and Paraguay, which no other driver in the field can say.
He is second in the championship anyway, because the other two are far better at harvesting the extras. Solberg has taken 85 of his 209 points from Sunday classifications and Power Stages — 41 percent of his season. Evans has 76. Pajari has 31, roughly 15 percent of his total. In Kenya, Croatia and Japan, Solberg scored one, zero and zero points from the final classification and still banked ten bonus points on each of those weekends. Three ruined rallies paid him 30 points, which is more than a win.
This is not a loophole. It is the system doing exactly what it was written to do: keep drivers pushing on Sunday morning when their rally is already gone, and keep a wrecked weekend from ending a title campaign. It is worth understanding how the drivers’ and manufacturers’ points structures actually differ, because they reward completely different behaviour, and this season is the clearest illustration the WRC has produced in years. Pajari is winning rallies. Solberg is farming the calendar. Evans is doing a bit of both and leading on 230.
Toyota now has nothing left to protect
The manufacturers’ title finished 614 to Hyundai’s 410, with Toyota’s second entry adding another 227 on its own. Eight one-two finishes. Eleven wins from twelve. All five of the team’s drivers have won at least twice in 2026, which is not a statistic any manufacturer has much recent claim to.
It also removes the one argument a team can make in public for managing its drivers. For the past two months Toyota could plausibly say that team orders, nominations and Sunday tactics were about securing a manufacturers’ crown. That cover is gone. For Sardinia and Saudi Arabia, any intervention is nakedly a choice between three of its own employees, made in front of all three. Teams in that position historically say they will let them race. The interesting bit is what happens on the second-to-last stage of the year when one of them is nine seconds from a title.
Two rallies, 70 points, and a road-order tax
Rally Italia Sardegna runs 1–4 October, pushed to an autumn date, and the season ends in Saudi Arabia on 11–14 November. That is 70 points still on the table, which keeps Ogier on 171 from just ten starts, Fourmaux on 167 and Katsuta on 163 all mathematically alive, if not seriously so.
The real problem belongs to Evans. He leads by 17 from Pajari and 21 from Solberg, and he has not won a rally since Japan in May — five events ago. He is leading this championship on second and third places and a steady drip of bonus points, and he is about to take that lead onto two loose-surface rallies where being the championship leader has never been much of a gift. Sardinia’s abrasive, rock-strewn gravel punishes the cars that run early and sweep the surface clean for everyone behind. A 17-point cushion evaporates in one stage, as Chile just demonstrated at his expense.
For Hyundai, Fourmaux’s podium is about the extent of the good news, and the team’s attention has visibly moved to what it does about the 2027 regulations. For Toyota, the trophy is already in the cabinet. The argument is not.
Results, classifications and championship points are taken from official WRC timing and the FIA World Rally Championship standings.
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