Thierry Neuville was leading the Croatia Rally when his Hyundai sustained damage on the final Power Stage and retired. Just like that, Takamoto Katsuta had his second consecutive World Rally Championship victory — and a place in the history books no Japanese driver has ever occupied.
Katsuta now leads the 2026 WRC standings with 81 points, seven clear of Elfyn Evans. Four rounds in, and the 33-year-old who spent years as Toyota’s patient apprentice is the man everyone else is chasing.
The win didn’t come cleanly. Nobody’s did in Croatia. The asphalt event returned after a year’s absence with mostly new stages, and even though the weather stayed dry, gravel and dirt dragged onto the road surface turned it treacherous.
Tyres were the great equalizer — they punished the brave and the unlucky in equal measure.
Sami Pajari, Katsuta’s Toyota teammate, led the rally for most of the weekend, hunting his maiden WRC win. Then SS14 happened. A puncture forced Pajari to stop and change a wheel, and his lead evaporated.
Katsuta suffered tyre damage in the same stage. Both Toyota drivers were suddenly looking at second and third, with Neuville sitting pretty out front.
That held until the Power Stage on Sunday morning, when Neuville’s rally ended in the cruelest possible fashion. Katsuta inherited the victory. Pajari slotted into second, 20.7 seconds back, completing a Toyota one-two that nobody at TGR-WRT would have scripted this way.
“I felt sorry for Thierry and Martijn and the Hyundai team, because I know myself how painful these moments can be,” Katsuta said. “Still, I need to be happy for my team and for Aaron, because I think we did quite a clever job this weekend.”
Deputy Team Principal Juha Kankkunen — a four-time world champion who knows something about winning and losing — was characteristically blunt. “We always want to win but we would never wish for something like this to happen to a competitor. It can and has happened to us before.”
Then he said the quiet part out loud: “To have a Japanese driver with a Japanese manufacturer leading the championship — this has never been done before.”
It hasn’t. Toyota has won constructors’ titles. Tommi Mäkinen ran the team to glory. But a Japanese driver atop the individual standings? Never, until now.
The rest of the Toyota garage had a messy weekend rescued by a strong Sunday. Evans and Oliver Solberg both went off the road on Friday morning, killing their overall chances. But rallying’s Super Sunday format gave them a lifeline, and Solberg seized it — topping both the Super Sunday classification and the Power Stage for maximum bonus points.
Evans finished second in both. Solberg sits third in the championship at 68 points; Evans second at 74.
Their combined Sunday haul pushed Toyota’s manufacturers’ championship lead to a commanding 65 points over Hyundai, 206 to 141. That gap tells the real story of 2026 so far. Toyota has depth.
When two of its four drivers crash out on Friday, the other two finish one-two, and the crashers still outscore everyone else on Sunday.
Hayden Paddon claimed third overall for Hyundai, more than two minutes behind Pajari — a distant podium that underscored how thin Hyundai’s weekend became after Neuville’s retirement.
Pajari, who has now finished on the podium in four of five events this season, was measured despite the sting of losing his lead. “There is still some disappointment because we were in the lead for so long, but this just gives more hunger for the next rally.”
Rally Islas Canarias comes in less than two weeks, another asphalt test on Gran Canaria’s volcanic roads. Katsuta goes in wearing the leader’s jersey. Four rallies ago, nobody outside the Toyota motorhome would have predicted that sentence.
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