Taylor Gill’s 2026 World Rally Championship season keeps growing. The Australian driver and co-driver Daniel Brkic confirmed on August 18 that they’ve added WRC Rally Chile Bío Bío — round twelve on the calendar, set for September 10-13 — to a program that had already picked up round eleven’s WRC Rally del Paraguay just three days earlier. What started as a three-round cameo season has turned into a five-round campaign, and the back half looks nothing like the front half.
The bigger change isn’t the extra rally, it’s everything wrapped around it. Gill and Brkic spent the first three rounds of their WRC2 season — Rally Sweden, Croatia Rally and Secto Rally Finland — in a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2. For Paraguay and now Chile, they’re switching to a Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 run by Toksport World Rally Team, a German outfit that has built its business on turning privateer budgets into legitimate WRC2 results.
That kind of manufacturer swap is far more normal in WRC2 than it would be one class up in the top-flight Rally1 field. Rally2 machinery — the Fabia, the GR Yaris, Ford’s Puma, Hyundai’s i20 N, Citroen’s C3 — is built to a common technical envelope: roughly 280 horsepower, a spec turbo restrictor, and homologation rules tight enough that lap-time gaps usually come down to tyres, setup and driver rather than raw manufacturer advantage. Because no factory-funded superteam locks up the best equipment in this class, a driver’s car and team for any given round is largely a function of budget and which outfit has an available seat, not brand loyalty. Gill isn’t defecting from Toyota so much as following wherever the funding and the entry lined up.
For readers more used to American club rallying than the world championship, the format itself will look familiar. Events like Tennessee’s Overmountain Rally or Minnesota’s Ojibwe Forests Rally run the same basic structure — closed public and forest roads, pace notes, a competitor service park — just at a regional, grassroots level. WRC2 is that same format wrapped in FIA homologation rules, world championship points, and a spec-built rally car costing well into six figures before a privateer even lines up at a start line.
That cost is exactly why the scheduling here matters. Rally Paraguay and Rally Chile Bío Bío are the only two South American rounds on the entire 2026 calendar, sitting thirteen days apart — a brutal ask for any privateer trying to freight a car, spares and a service crew across a continent twice in a fortnight rather than once. Folding a second event into an already-booked South American trip is the more economical route: one long-haul logistics chain instead of two, one set of flights and freight instead of a second full deployment later in the season. For a self-funded program, that kind of scheduling math can matter as much as the stage times.
Gill’s rise is a product of the sport’s newer scouting pathway rather than a family fortune. He and Brkic came up through Motorsport Australia and the FIA’s Rally Star programme, which identifies promising young talent and backs them into European rallying, and the pairing broke through by winning at Rally Sweden in February 2025 in the Junior WRC ranks. That result helped put them on the radar for a step up to full Rally2 machinery this year — first in the GR Yaris across Sweden, Croatia and Finland, and now in Toksport’s Fabia for the South American double-header.
Gill kept his message simple when he confirmed the Chile date on social media, saying only that “Daniel Brkic and I are as motivated as ever” heading into the newly expanded block of rounds. For a young pairing still building a resume, that’s the right instinct — a two-rally, one-team, one-continent block is exactly the kind of consistent mileage that turns a promising rookie season into a program a bigger team notices. Whether Toksport’s Fabia suits Gill better than Toyota’s GR Yaris did will start to show in the stage times in Paraguay in late August, with Chile’s Bío Bío gravel following less than two weeks after that.
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