Yes, we are only two rounds into the 2025 World Rally Championship.
Yes, as Elfyn Evans himself has been keen to stress, the evolution of the points system this year has exaggerated the difference.
Yes, it is too early to be declaring anybody a championship favorite.
But has Toyota noticed a difference in Evans across the Monte Carlo and Sweden events this season?
Yes.
A reminder of how it currently lies: Evans is on 61 points with his nearest full-season rival, Kalle Rovanperä, on 31. His closest Hyundai rival, Thierry Neuville, has less than half Evans’ total.
The Welshman has won both Super Sundays so far, and took a clean sweep of everything in Sweden while he was second on the Monte powerstage as well as finishing second in the event itself.
From the outside looking in, the biggest difference in Evans has appeared to be how happy he’s been on the limit. While in the past he may have settled, in 2025 he’s attacked.
Evans has looked far happier on the limit this year
“I think with Elfyn there’s absolutely no question that on his day, he’s the fastest or one of the fastest guys – he’s in that top level that the championship has in terms of drivers,” Toyota technical director Tom Fowler told DirtFish.
“You can always tell with Elfyn when he comes into an event what kind of mindset he’s in, mainly from how the first stages go. If he comes and he’s on it, he’ll be on it.
“And we’ve seen that this season – that when he’s come into the events, the mindset is there and he’s hit the ground running in terms of his driving from the early stages and then been able to hold that, improve that and most importantly, for any driver not just Elfyn, is to handle the dips that come during a rally.
“We are talking about events which are three or four days long; you aren’t going to have a perfect stage every stage, and how you handle that as a driver is one of the most important things. It can be slightly wrong setup, slightly wrong tire choice, slightly bad driving or whatever it might be, you have to get to the end of the stage and say ‘OK that was the bad one, but it’s not going to affect me going forwards’.
“And we’ve seen this year that he’s handled that situation in these first two rallies really well, and it’s been an important point because we’ve had so many new things this season in terms of technical regulations that no matter how good the team prepares, you aren’t going to be correct all of the time in 20-odd stages per event.”
The pivotal stage in Sweden
Perhaps the clearest example of Evans’ 2025 mindset was on the final morning of Rally Sweden.
In a super-close fight all weekend, Evans held a three-second lead over Toyota team-mate Takamoto Katsuta but dropped 7.5s over the first pass of Västervik.
Suddenly trailing by 4.5s overall, Evans had a choice to make: settle for second, or go all-out for the win. He chose the approach he hasn’t always favored – the risky one.
“I was confident that he was going to do a good stage, but what we saw from the time was actually an incredible stage to be honest,” Fowler admitted.
“And I think it’s the mindset that we’re talking about that we’ve seen him with this season so far, which is that he wanted to win that rally. He wanted to get those points.
“The first run of that stage obviously he wasn’t happy with what he did, and knew he could do better and went out on the second one and really laid down the law for not just Takamoto but the whole rally, as he completely… we looked at the performance of Ott [Tänak] or Thierry [Neuville] in that stage, they were pushing incredibly hard and you can see it in the mistakes that they made.
Fowler was extremely impressed by Evans' response in Sweden
“Actually they were fast, but they lost time here and there whereas Elfyn was fast but he didn’t lose time, and that’s how he did that incredible stage.”
Faster than anyone by 6.7s, and crucially Katsuta by 8.2s, it was the key to his round two victory.
The hybrid factor
The obvious conclusion to reach regarding Evans’ upturn in performance is the removal of hybrid for this year.
Evans has downplayed the impact of this, but it’s certainly true that his driving now is more in-line with what we saw in 2020 and 2021 before hybrid was introduced to the WRC.
So what parallels can be drawn between Evans this year and Evans behind the wheel of the Yaris WRC?
“It’s a really good question and of course it’s something that, as a team, we investigate all these parameters about – not only why we as a team are fast and slow in different sectors, but why a different driver’s doing different things in different sectors. And that also means from rally to rally, season to season,” Fowler explained.
“The hybrid one… you’re not the first person to mention that: is Elfyn’s performance this season related [to that]? Our information says no. We have an understanding about what has gone in Elfyn’s direction aside from his own mindset and his own performance. Of course there’s other elements that can contribute.
“We don’t think that the hybrid is one of them, but of course it can have an effect.”
Fowler believes it’s a combination of all the different factors that changed over the off-season that have made the difference, and that Evans has simply done a better job adapting than most.
“I think what’s important to look at this season is the amount of things that’s changed,” Fowler said.
“So the hybrid has gone away, the engine is less powerful because of the restrictor change, the car is lighter – it’s not only lighter but it’s a different balance because of the weight mostly coming away from the rear where the hybrid battery was situated.
“And on top of that, the only thing that holds the car on the road – the tire – is totally different. The way to extract the performance, as a team and a driver, has changed immensely since last season.
“I think Elfyn has done a really good job on his transition from… if we think about it from a testing perspective, at the end of last year, particularly as a team, we were trying to extract everything we possibly could from a car with those tires of last year, and that setup; all the way up to Japan powerstage, we were brainstorming between us and the drivers how to get every single millisecond out of that car with that setup.
“But come Monte Carlo, nearly all of that information had to be different. So as a team we had to swap over our mindset about what are the most important elements to concentrate on, but the drivers had to do the same thing.
“And I think as a team we’ve done it well, and I think as a driver Elfyn’s done it well.”
Evans’ view
Evans is aware more than anyone that the season is but young. However, he acknowledges he has adapted well to the Hankook tire in particular.
“It’s been a good start to the year for us,” he admitted. “We seem to have adapted pretty quickly to the new tire. Things have gone well in both events.”
But he also feels he’s been fortunate.
Evans feels his points lead "doesn't mean much" at this stage
“Obviously, we were lucky after a strong event in Monte to have good conditions, or at least conditions that were quite favorable to be early on the road in Sweden. That definitely helped us then towards securing another strong result,” Evans explained.
“I think it’s quite rare normally to put two strong results like this together, so we can be happy with the first two, but of course, now the focus changes to gravel where we have to do all the learning again with a new tire.”
With such a strong lead, Evans is all-but guaranteed to still be leading the championship after Safari Rally Kenya.
But he insists his mentality will not change.
“Well naturally with the strong start to the year we’ve had, we naturally have a bit of a lead in the championship, but of course it’s such early days, it doesn’t really mean much at all at this stage, especially with the new points structure,” he said.
“There’s so many points available now for a strong weekend and especially on Sunday still. So yeah, the points don’t really mean so much at the moment, we just have to go through the season bagging as many as we can from each rally.”
