BBC RADIO 1B
Five times a runner-up. One puncture with the title in his hands. Then a final Power Stage that swung away from Oliver Solberg two corners from the end. Elfyn Evans has become world champion after years of coming close, in a finish that will live in rallying for a very long time.
For years, Elfyn Evans has carried the particular ache of being close enough to see the world title and disciplined enough to keep returning for it. Five times he had finished the World Rally Championship season as runner-up. Five times he had stood at the edge of the greatest prize in rallying and watched it go elsewhere. In Sardinia, after a rally that seemed to take the title away from him before giving it back in the last moments, Evans finally became world champion.
The ending was so sharp it almost refuses to settle into a sentence. Oliver Solberg led the decisive Power Stage. He and Elliott Edmondson had the speed, the road position and a rally-winning drive behind them. Evans and Scott Martin needed the stage to turn their way. With two corners left, Solberg went off the road. He recovered and reached the finish. The seconds lost there were enough to change the championship. Evans had done what he had to do. After all the years of waiting, it was real.
Second place is an extraordinary achievement. To finish there five times is a career of consistency, speed and resilience. It is also a strange place to live. The season has been good enough to bring you within reach of everything, then the final arithmetic leaves somebody else holding the trophy. In 2025 Evans missed the title by four points to Sébastien Ogier. Four points across a year of stages, punctures, split times and decisions. A difference tiny enough to replay, large enough to define the result.
A rally driver cannot make a living from what nearly happened. There is another season, another surface, another moment where the road can take the car away from the line. Evans came back to that uncertainty with the same quiet persistence. He and Martin kept doing the work, kept earning the points, kept placing themselves in a championship fight. Their long run of near misses has now become the measure of what this win means.
Sardinia kept the title open all the way to its final stage. Evans arrived under pressure from Toyota team-mates Sami Pajari and Solberg, with 35 points available in the final round. The rally kept all three in the story. Evans finished Saturday in fifth overall, still leading the championship, with almost no margin for an error on the last day.
Sunday gave Evans the kind of setback that makes an already complicated title calculation feel suddenly cruel. On SS16, a puncture forced him to stop and change a wheel. Time disappeared while the road kept moving around him. The Super Sunday points he needed slipped away. The advantage that had protected him through the season was reduced to a narrow final-stage problem: beat Solberg on the Wolf Power Stage, or watch the title move to the younger man.
There are many ways to lose a championship in rallying, and most of them happen far from the cameras. A tyre gives up its grip. A line closes sooner than expected. One slow corner becomes a string of small losses. Evans and Martin still had to get back into the car, make the next start, read the notes and give the final seven kilometres everything they had. The task was brutally simple to describe and impossible to make comfortable.
Solberg had reason to believe the rally was his. He was the fastest of the championship contenders across the final day and still held the rally lead. A win would make him champion as well as winner of the event. Evans needed a clean, committed stage and the best time he could find. It was a head-to-head finale between team-mates, with the rally and the season pulling in different directions.
For most of the stage, Solberg was ahead. Then, two corners before the finish, he went wide and off the road. In a rally car the distinction between a fast line and the wrong side of the stage can be measured in inches. The cost, when it comes, is measured in seconds. Solberg got the Toyota back onto the road and finished the test. His rally victory remained in hand. The championship swung towards Evans.
Evans and Martin had to wait for the time to become certain. The season seemed to stop at the finish control. A year of work was suddenly reduced to a timing screen and the gap beside two names. Then the result came through. Evans had beaten Solberg on the Power Stage. The title was his.
Five times runner-up. Four points short a year ago. World champion at last, with the title decided in the final corners of the final stage.
ViPeople Motorsport DeskRallying has always made suspense from the distance between two cars on two different roads. This time, the whole season seemed to fit inside the last few seconds of one stage. It was a finish for the ages, with both men driving into the uncertainty before the final answer appeared.
Solberg’s part in this ending was enormous. He had driven brilliantly through the final day and was close enough to the finish to imagine both victories together. An error so late in a title fight can stay with a driver for a long time. It is hard to watch the title turn on those two corners without feeling for the crew that had led the rally and reached the final test with everything in front of them.
Solberg left Sardinia with the rally victory and a second-place finish in the championship. He recovered from the incident, completed the stage and won by 57.6 seconds from Ogier. That is a remarkable weekend, with the sting of what might have been alongside it. Evans’s joy and Solberg’s disappointment belong to the same finish. One man’s long-awaited answer arrived at the exact moment another man saw his own chance pass.
The two Toyotas came to Sardinia as team-mates and title rivals. Solberg’s rally win and Evans’s title both demanded more than a single moment can show. Evans answered the pressure, carried the puncture loss and beat the time in front of him. Solberg recovered under extraordinary pressure and still won the rally. Each drove a different kind of courage into the final kilometres.
Evans becomes the first British World Rally champion since Richard Burns in 2001, and only the third British driver to win the title after Burns and Colin McRae. For Wales, the achievement has its own deep resonance. A Welsh driver has carried the flag to the summit of a sport that asks its champions to find speed and calm on ever-changing roads.
Martin’s name belongs beside his on the achievement. A co-driver’s title lives in the notes, the timing, the trust and the unbroken rhythm inside a car being thrown across gravel. He has spent the season calling the road that Evans had to commit to. Martin’s first world title belongs to the same achievement as Evans’s, part of the partnership that kept them close enough to take this final chance.
| Pos. | Crew | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oliver Solberg / Elliott Edmondson | Rally winners |
| 2 | Sébastien Ogier / Vincent Landais | +57.6 sec |
| 3 | Sami Pajari / Marko Salminen | Third overall |
| 4 | Adrien Fourmaux / Alexandre Coria | Fourth overall |
| 5 | Elfyn Evans / Scott Martin | World champions |
The arithmetic now has its final shape. Evans and Martin finish the season on 243 points, five ahead of Solberg and Elliott Edmondson. Sami Pajari and Marko Salminen are third, six points behind the champions. The top three finished within eleven points after thirteen rallies, and all three arrived in Sardinia with a route to the title.
| Pos. | Crew | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elfyn Evans / Scott Martin | 243 |
| 2 | Oliver Solberg / Elliott Edmondson | 238 |
| 3 | Sami Pajari / Marko Salminen | 237 |
The points make this more than a dramatic ending. Evans did not arrive at a title through one fortunate stage alone. His lead had been earned across a full season of starts, careful Sunday scoring and two victories, first in Sweden and later in Japan. The final day asked him to protect that work after the puncture took away the safety of a larger margin.
Solberg’s five-point deficit carries its own weight. He won Sardinia and Chile, took the rally to the final kilometres and came within seconds of winning both the event and the championship. Pajari’s third place confirms the depth of Toyota’s season: three team-mates stayed in contention until the final round, each with victories and each with a different route through the year.
For years, Evans’s story could be told through the gap between what he had achieved and what still eluded him. That gap has gone now. The record will always carry five second places. His final line is the 2026 champion, with 243 points beside his name. He and Martin are world champions. The wildness of the finish made the long effort matter even more.
There will be time to remember every close season and every point that went the other way. There will be photographs of the airborne Toyota, the dust hanging over Sardinia, the final timing screen and the crew who came through five runner-up campaigns to reach the top. For now, the simplest words are the ones Evans has spent years chasing: at last.
