Elfyn Evans Is World Champion, and the Rally1 Era Ended in the Same Handful of Corners
Six seasons, five runner-up finishes, and a title that turned on Oliver Solberg sliding into the sand with about a kilometre of the last Rally1 stage left to run.
Elfyn Evans is the 2026 World Rally Champion, and the way he got there is the sort of thing that sounds invented when you write it down. He finished the final rally of the season fifth, nearly five minutes off the winner, and he won the title because the man beating him slid off the road with about a kilometre of the last stage of the year still to run.
The final numbers: Evans 243 points, Oliver Solberg 238, Sami Pajari 237. Going into Sunday at Rally Italia Sardegna, Evans held 240 to Solberg's 234 and Pajari's 228, with a maximum of ten bonus points still on the table — five from the Super Sunday classification and five from the season-closing Wolf Power Stage. Solberg needed most of them.
He did not get them. The last stage of the 2026 season was Sassari-Argentiera, 7.10 kilometres of gravel, and with a handful of corners left Solberg slid wide and put his GR Yaris into the sand. He got going again and completed the stage, but the seconds were gone and so was the championship. Thierry Neuville and Martijn Wydaeghe won the Power Stage for Hyundai Shell Mobis WRT in 4:54.2.
None of which should take anything away from the rally Solberg actually drove. He and Elliott Edmondson won Rally Italia Sardegna by 57.6 seconds from Sébastien Ogier and Vincent Landais, with Pajari and Marko Salminen third at 1:37.4 to complete an all-Toyota podium. Adrien Fourmaux and Alexandre Coria were fourth for Hyundai; Evans and Scott Martin were fifth, 4:48.1 adrift. It was Solberg's third win of the season, taken across 17 stages and 306.92 competitive kilometres between 1 and 4 October, and it was not enough.
For Evans, this is the end of a very long wait. The Welshman has finished runner-up in the drivers' championship five times — 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — and twice arrived at a season finale leading the standings without converting it. He is the first British world rally champion since Richard Burns took the title for Subaru in 2001, and only the third overall, after Colin McRae in 1995.
"I don't think it's quite sunk in yet," Evans said afterwards. "I was quite sure that it was over."
The other thing that ended in Sardinia was the car. Rally1 ran for five seasons and Sardinia was its farewell; from next year the WRC's top class moves to the WRC27 regulations, built around the slower and considerably cheaper Rally2 machinery. Toyota's own count puts the GR Yaris Rally1 on 47 World Rally Championship wins, more than any single model has managed under any previous set of rules, and the team had already wrapped up a record-equalling sixth consecutive manufacturers' title before the cars even got to Italy.
So the fastest generation of rally car most people watching have ever seen signed off with a championship decided by a driver putting two wheels into the soft stuff two corners from the line. Evans gets the number one on the door next season, on a car that will be slower than the one he won it in. Solberg gets the win, the fastest time of the weekend by nearly a minute, and five fewer points than he needed.
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