Kalle Rovanperä won the Central European Rally, his third victory of 2025, while his Toyota team wrapped up its fifth consecutive World Rally Championship manufacturers’ title.
Elfyn Evans finished second – overhauling Ott Tänak by 5.6s on the final stage – to retake the lead of the drivers’ championship as erstwhile leader Sébastien Ogier crashed out on Saturday.
Ogier however won both Super Sunday and the powerstage to limit the championship damage, meaning with two rounds remaining he’s 13 points adrift of Evans – a position he shares with Rovanperä.
Toyota had never won CER prior to the 2025 edition of the event, but the GR Yaris Rally1 was on top throughout.
Initially it was Ogier who led a titanic scrap with Rovanperä, but the Finn moved ahead by 0.7s on Saturday’s opener before a puncture he hadn’t detected with the TPMS sensor not working sent Ogier into a tree and out for the day.
That eased the pressure on Rovanperä to claim his third victory of the season, which he did by 43.7s.
Rovanperä struggled in Monte but has won both Tarmac events since (Canarias and CER)
“It’s great to be back on Tarmac and again with a win, a really good weekend,” Rovanperä said. “Our pace was good so we did a proper job.
“Huge congratulations to everyone at the team for another title – clearly the best team dominating, so we are super good as a team. I’m hungry for this drivers’ title, we increase our chances with this result. It won’t be easy but we will try to continue.”
Evans didn’t always have the pace of his two team-mates in Central Europe, but stealing second from Tänak – who had started Sunday 8.4s ahead – earned him an extra two championship points. He also overcame a five-second time penalty for moving a bale chicane on SS1, and scored second in both Super Sunday and the powerstage.
Tänak secured his first podium finish since Estonia in July, but bolting two soft tires on the rear of the car for the powerstage failed to pay off. He is now 50 points behind in the title race with just 70 left to play for.
“For sure we tried everything this weekend, no question, but I think that’s what we deserve,” Tänak said.
Reigning world champion Thierry Neuville is now officially the outgoing world champion after he crashed into a bridge on Sunday’s first stage. Leaving CER empty handed means the Belgian is now mathematically out of championship contention.
Neuville’s exit had little impact on the rest of the Rally1 drivers however, other than promoting M-Sport’s Josh McErlean to seventh.
Takamoto Katsuta came home fourth for the second year in a row at CER, beating a downbeat Adrien Fourmaux – who’d been fighting Ogier and Rovanperä on Friday morning before losing loads of time on the particularly dirty SS5/6 – by close to a minute.
Sami Pajari had an incident-free weekend to take sixth, just 9.3s behind Fourmaux, while Grégoire Munster retired on Friday after getting his line wrong over a jump and breaking his Ford Puma Rally1’s suspension.
Oliver Solberg finished as the lead Rally2 car in eighth overall, but it was Czech driver Jan Černý who topped WRC2 for the very first time in his Škoda Fabia RS Rally2.
Alejandro Cachón had been the class of the category for so much of the event, but running slightly wide and smacking a haybale that was protecting a building broke his Toyota’s suspension and left him stranded.
Léo Rossel had initially been the one to benefit, taking the lead at the end of Saturday. But his Citroën C3 Rally2 developed electrical trouble on the way back to service park in Passau and forced him into retirement.
