Oliver Solberg and Elliott Edmondson won Rally Italia Sardegna in 3h24m57.0s, 57.6 seconds clear of Sebastien Ogier, and finished the 2026 World Rally Championship five points short of the title. Elfyn Evans and Scott Martin were fifth in the rally, 4m48.1s behind them, and are world champions on 243 points to Solberg's 238, according to Toyota Gazoo Racing's provisional final classification. The FIA's event review describes a title "decided on the penultimate corner of the final stage of the final round".

Sardinia was the final round only because the FIA made it one. On 17 September the governing body and WRC Promoter took Rally Saudi Arabia out of the championship, and Sardegna on 1 to 4 October became "the 13th and final round of the season". Evans arrived 17 points ahead of Sami Pajari and 21 ahead of Solberg, all three of them in Toyotas.

Friday and Saturday: the road and the rally lead

Evans opened the road on Friday, sweeping loose, sandy gravel that Toyota says a hot and dry summer had left behind, and finished the day sixth, with Pajari fifth and Solberg third. Solberg took the rally lead on Saturday morning. By Saturday night he was 33.6 seconds ahead of Ogier, with Evans fifth and his provisional championship advantage down to six points, in the FIA's Saturday report. The same report set out the tie rule that would hang over Sunday: a Sardinia win would give Solberg "the advantage on countback".

Thierry Neuville had been the nearest car to Solberg, 2.7 seconds behind at Saturday's lunchtime service, per the FIA's review. He crashed 1.1km into SS11, damaging the rear of his Hyundai, and the FIA's Saturday report records that his retirement promoted Ogier to second. Neuville restarted on Sunday and was classified 15th.

SS16: rocks and a puncture

Ten points remained once the rally order settled: five for the Super Sunday classification, the aggregate of Sunday's stages, and five for the Power Stage, each paid 5-4-3-2-1. Solberg led the Sunday aggregate at the leg's halfway point and had cut his deficit to three points, the FIA's review records.

On SS16, the second pass of Osilo to Tergu, Evans stopped to change a tyre and conceded "close to two minutes", in Toyota's account. "At the start of the third there were rocks everywhere and we tried to pull our way through, but immediately we punctured," he said. He kept fifth overall, fell out of the Super Sunday points, and went to the last stage with what Toyota called "a virtual lead of just one point over Solberg".

One point is the arithmetic behind that sentence. Evans stood to finish on 240, his 230 plus 10 for fifth place. Solberg's 209 plus 25 for the win plus five for leading Super Sunday made 239. Toyota's release puts the consequence in plain terms: "whoever set the quicker time would be world champion."

SS17: the split times and the last stretch

Solberg started the Power Stage knowing Evans's time. He was faster at the split times, Toyota says, then "ran off the road in the final stretch", got going again and finished the stage 8.9 seconds down on Evans. "In the Power Stage I knew I had to push hard to beat Elfyn, but I wasn't sure I was doing enough, so I tried pushing even more," he said. "Then I made a small mistake at the end, couldn't save the car and we went off."

Evans had not expected his own run to be enough. "It was a messy run so I was pretty sure I hadn't done enough and Oliver was coming quicker until he had that moment near the end," he said. Neuville won the stage, the FIA's review records. Pajari was second fastest and Evans third, per Motorsport Week's stage order, worth three points.

Five points became the final margin by this route: Evans 230 plus 10 plus 0 plus 3 is 243; Solberg 209 plus 25 plus 4 plus 0 is 238. The off cost Solberg more than the stage. Pajari was fastest across Sunday and took the Super Sunday maximum, per the FIA review, and Solberg's four points from it were one fewer than he had been holding before the last stage started.

Pajari, six points short

Pajari's 213 plus 15 for third, five for Super Sunday and four for the Power Stage gave him 237, six behind Evans and one behind Solberg. Toyota counts nine podiums for him in 2026, more than anybody else, and three wins, the same number as Solberg, in what the team notes was only his second full season at this level.

Solberg's season ran the other way to his last stage. Toyota says he was 59 points adrift at one stage of a "character-building mid-season period" and finished with back-to-back wins in Chile and Sardinia, in his first full season at the top level, having opened it with victory at the Monte Carlo Rally.

Five times second, then first

Evans and Martin had finished championship runners-up in five of the previous six years, Toyota notes, and won this title with two victories, Sweden and Japan. Toyota calls Evans the first Welsh driver to win it. The FIA's review places him as the first British drivers' champion since Richard Burns in 2001. Toyota had already settled the manufacturers' title in Chile, and by its count this is the seventh time in eight years that one of its crews has taken the drivers' crown.

Ogier's second place was his 121st WRC podium, one more than Sebastien Loeb's record, and came on his 214th start, also a record by Toyota's count. The GR Yaris Rally1 won 12 of the season's 13 rallies in the final year of its homologation cycle, before new technical regulations arrive for 2027. In WRC2 the champions are Robert Virves and Jakko Viilo, second in Sardinia by 0.7 seconds to Roope Korhonen and Anssi Viinikka, per the FIA.

Akio Toyoda, chairman of the team that ran all three contenders, did not pretend to neutrality afterwards. "Publicly, I have to say that I want all our drivers to win," he said in Toyota's release. "But if I'm being honest, this year I was cheering for Elfyn. Sorry, Sami and Oliver, but I simply couldn't let Elfyn and Scott end up second again."