Oliver Solberg leads Rally Sweden after the opening stage, winning Thursday night’s test by 3.8 seconds.
The Umeå stage – featuring the spectator-friendly section through the Red Barn Arena – is the traditional start to Rally Sweden, held under the cover of darkness on Thursday night. It will also run as the end-of-event powerstage on Sunday, while Friday and Saturday’s Umeå Sprint stage is a condensed version of SS1.
In 2025, first-on-the-road Elfyn Evans won the stage and Solberg repeated the trick in 2026, despite feeling his Toyota was “moving around from left to right”.
Evans trails Solberg by four points in the championship and felt he made a “conservative start”, but was still second quickest on the stage ahead of the third points-scoring Toyota driven by Takamoto Katsuta (+4.4s).
“The stage is pure ice, same as last year,” Katsuta lamented. “Tomorrow will be a different story, that’s what I’m hoping.”
Jon Armstrong will be hoping the same as he became the first driver to make a mistake at Rally Sweden.
Misjudging his braking for a square right, the M-Sport driver scrubbed off speed against the snow on the inside and then dipped into the bank on the exit. While he got away with it without getting stuck, his Puma Rally1 was down on power for the rest of the stage and he dropped 45.1s.
“Really lucky not to get stuck,” Armstrong assessed. “It was a difficult stage to read the grip, I just missed my braking and was lucky to get away with it. Not a good way to start, but at least we’re still here.”
Further up the leaderboard, Sami Pajari completed an early 1-2-3-4 for Toyota with the Hyundais holding a 5-6-7 formation; Thierry Neuville leading the chase, 6.7s off the lead.
“I was just following my feeling,” said the 2024 world champion. “I’m braking super, super early all the time but I just don’t know if the car will stop or not. I was able to develop a bit the feeling through the stage and hopefully that helps us tomorrow.”
Adrien Fourmaux and Esapekka Lappi were respectively 1.2s behind the i20 N Rally1 ahead of them.
Josh McErlean struggled with visibility as his “windscreen fogged up halfway through” SS1, but he was the quickest M-Sport driver, albeit 15.7s off the pace. Team-mate Mãrtiņš Sesks was 2.5s slower.
