Three rounds into the World Rally Championship season and Toyota has three wins in a row – for the second year running.
Toyota’s deputy team principal Juha Kankkunen told DirtFish in the days leading up to the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally that there’d be no repeat of its 2025 dominance, that Hyundai would draw closer. That has yet to happen: Adrien Fourmaux’s second place on the Safari is the only time Toyota has been blocked from sweeping the podium places so far in 2026.
It would be understandable for winning to simply become normal and the minimum expectation for Toyota. But team principal Jari-Matti Latvala has warned against his own team becoming too comfortable with that winning feeling.
“You don’t necessarily 100% get used to it, but the expectations are growing,” Latvala said on DirtFish’s latest episode of SPIN, The Rally Pod. “Your expectations are that you should be able to always fight for the win.
“There is a risk sometimes that you think that the winning is getting normal. But it should never get absolutely normal because it’s always something special when you win; meaning that when you win, you have to work for it. You have to do things right. It’s not that it’s an element which comes to you on the tray table.
Fourmaux has been only interloper among Toyota's otherwise iron grip on the WRC podium in 2026
“That’s always something you have to remind [yourself in the] back of your head. That the day when you start to get too comfortable, then the others will pass you by quite quickly. That is a challenging part, which you have to adjust in your head.”
Hyundai’s mid-season resurgence last year kept Toyota on its toes; its pace on the fast gravel of Estonia and Finland put the i20 N Rally1s right at the heart of the lead battle, with Oliver Solberg the only Toyota able to match Ott Tänak’s pace in Tartu.
“It wakes you up,” said Latvala, “because then when you get a little bit comfortable with these wins, then comes a moment that you realize that, OK, wow, the others have been working hard and they found out something more than the others.
“Oliver Solberg, when he came to Estonia, he was out from the box when he was doing the testing, finding a little bit different setup than our top drivers. The setup was working and he basically was very comfortable with the car and he won the event. Then we did the correction with the other guys for Finland.
“That’s sometimes like when you are too much in your own circle, these moments comes up that somebody goes a little bit out from the box and finds something else, or does things a little bit differently.
“But you need these moments because that keeps you more in the game. If you don’t get them, then it can start to go step by step downhill if you’re comfortable with the winning all the time.”
What does that mean in the short term, though? Latvala is convinced Toyota’s dominance over arch-rivals Hyundai is at risk of being curtailed in Croatia – especially with so much of the itinerary being new to the WRC.
“I expect now also that Hyundai will be closer,” he said. “They’ve been a bit behind. I must say they haven’t been on the level I expected them to be. But now in Croatia I think there is a chance that they will be challenging us a lot more.
“And of course we hope to see also M-Sport Ford, that they would be also joining in the fight. But overall this event is more focused on the [pace] notes and who can get comfortable with the new roads.”
