Evans takes the World Rally title by five points after Solberg slides off in Sardinia

Elfyn Evans and co-driver Scott Martin are the 2026 World Rally champions after Oliver Solberg crashed out of the Power Stage in Sardinia with the title in reach. Solberg, 25, needed only to beat his Toyota team-mate on the final stage of Rally Italia Sardegna. With a couple of corners left he was ahead on the clock. He slid wide, ran into the sand, and lost the seconds that decided the season. Evans, who had already set his time, finished the year on 243 points. Solberg has 238. Sami Pajari, the third Toyota driver, has 237.

Evans won two of the 13 rounds. He led the table for much of the year and arrived in Italy at the top. The Power Stage rules made the last few kilometres a winner-take-all run between the two Toyota Gazoo Racing cars. Evans went first and set the mark. Solberg attacked, was in front, and left the road two corners from the finish. Evans said afterwards that he had been sure it was over, and that he felt for Solberg. Motorsport UK described the pair as locked in that stage knowing the fastest time would be champion.

The British line

Evans is the third British driver to win the drivers' title, after Colin McRae in 1995 and Richard Burns in 2001. The gap is 25 years. Martin becomes the fourth British co-driver to win a world championship. The crew's two rally wins this season were enough because the points system rewards stage results and Power Stage bonuses as well as overall victories. A driver can lead the championship without dominating Sundays. Evans did that. Solberg's crash converted a five-point deficit, the margin Evans holds now, into a title.

Sebastien Ogier is fourth on 189. Adrien Fourmaux, in a Hyundai, is fifth on 183. The top three are all Toyota. The manufacturers' fight was not the story of the final stage. The drivers' fight was three Toyota cars inside six points, and a sandbank.

What the crash was worth

Solberg did not need to win the rally. He needed to beat Evans on the Power Stage by enough to collect the bonus points that would have passed him. BBC Sport reported he was on course to take the lead of the championship with a few hundred metres left. The slide cost those bonus points and left him five short. Five points is one Power Stage place, or a single stage win on another round. It is the smallest margin that still counts as a finished season.

The points table also shows how little separated the podium from a different champion. Pajari, on 237, finished six points behind Evans and one behind Solberg. A different Power Stage order among the three Toyota cars would have produced a different name on the trophy. Ogier, a multiple champion running a partial season, was 54 points back on 189 and was not in the final arithmetic. Fourmaux's 183 is the first non-Toyota total, 60 points off the title. The championship was decided inside one team.

The road back to Britain

The championship returns to Britain in 2027 with Rally Scotland, the first home round of the WRC for years. Evans will arrive as champion rather than as a five-time runner-up, which is what he was on Saturday morning. A home round does not add points to a finished season. It does put the new champion on stages he knows, in front of a crowd that last saw a British drivers' champion in 2001, when Burns won.

Solberg leaves Sardinia as the driver who led the decisive stage and did not finish the corner. Evans leaves it as the driver who set a time, waited, and took the title by five points without winning the rally. The result does not change the car. It changes the number beside his name, and it does so because a team-mate, leading the decisive stage, ran wide two corners from a finish line in Sardinia.