Elfyn Evans has won the World Rally Championship after Oliver Solberg slid off the road with two corners left in the final stage of the season at Rally Italia Sardegna. The 37-year-old from north Wales is the first British world rally champion in 25 years, joining Colin McRae (1995) and Richard Burns (2001) as the only British men to take the title since the championship began in 1977.
Solberg, whose father Petter won the 2003 world title, was around one kilometre from becoming champion when his car went off into the Sardinian sand on Sunday afternoon. Evans had already been preparing what would have been his sixth runners-up speech. He took a 21-point lead into the last round despite winning only two of the previous 12 events, but had struggled all weekend with his road position while Solberg set the pace.
Evans admitted it was not how he would have liked to win, calling it “job done” after a difficult weekend. His co-driver Scott Martin said Evans had been apologising for his stage times as they waited for Solberg to finish. Evans said he felt for Solberg, having been in a similar position himself, and predicted that the driver would be one to watch in future.
The title ends a long run of near misses. Evans finished second in the championship in 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025, when he lost to Sebastien Ogier by four points in the final race. Three of those five runner-up finishes were settled on the final day, and twice he had led going into the last event. Across the 2026 season he and Martin were consistent on surfaces ranging from the streets of Monaco and the ice and snow of Sweden to the roads of Chile and the gravel of southern Europe.
Rallying runs in both families. Evans’s father Gwyndaf was a British champion and finished runner-up four times, the last of them in 2010, but never got the chance to contend at world level. Elfyn won his first WRC stage in Germany in 2014 and reached the podium in Argentina a year later, before being moved down to the WRC2 class in 2016. His first rally win came on home roads in Wales in 2017, and he marked the title by jumping into the Mediterranean with his Toyota Gazoo Racing team-mates.
