Nothing short of leading Rally Japan tonight would’ve satisfied home hero Takamoto Katsuta.
Now that he’s a two-time winner in the World Rally Championship, the expectation of a dream home victory only ramped up in 2026.
It hasn’t materialized.
Running wide into a drainage culvert and puncturing his rear-left tire cost Katsuta 6.7 seconds on the opening stage, but more importantly lost him a soft tire for the damp second stage.
There, he leaked 25.9s to stage winner and rally leader Elfyn Evans, and also complained of missing information from his pacenotes.
He ended the leg sixth overall and over a minute shy of the lead.
“Yeah… obviously not a very ideal day,” Katsuta told DirtFish. “Very bad for me. One of the worst days from the year, I’d say. So I’m very, very disappointed.
“I think straight away on the stage one, it went completely wrong,” he added. “We got a puncture and we lost one soft tire [so had] to use the hard tire for the second one. Then this moment I started to feel ‘it’s going to be quite tricky now’.”
Toyota team principal Jari-Matti Latvala stressed Katsuta was under pressure on his home event, but added that the two-time WRC winner had also raised his own expectations in Toyota City.
Latvala told DirtFish: “We just had a bit of a discussion with him. Of course it was a disappointment, but you have to remember in our sport there are days which you are not in your best and then you just need to reset it.
“And I said to him when you go in the road section yourself, remember, just to remind you that this is the greatest sport in the world that you can do. And just give a little bit of smile to your face and then it will start to go.
“[But] if you look now for the media zone, I’ve never seen so much media around Taka as I saw here. He is a celebrity and when he has been winning the events you know his status has grown out here, so it’s also something which he has learned to cope [with].
“And like you said it comes with age and maybe it’s now the point for the first time you know that something great has happened during the season and now he gets an experience so that when he comes here next year, then he will be ready. But he needed also this experience.”
Latvala knows first-hand how it feels to miss out on a victory a nation expects.
“I remember 2013 when I had a really bad Finland crashing on the second stage, and [Sébatien] Ogier won, and I said to myself: ‘Next year: I’m gonna win this rally.’
“And I remember, I was preparing for two weeks for the rally, I was watching the onboards, I was watching the recce videos, that I could memorize everything in my head when I go to the stages, and then, of course, the important part was the test I did was right. But the motivation and everything already started from that experience.”
Katsuta still has two days of Rally Japan, however, before any thoughts turn toward 2027.
“Simply I’m not thinking about any position or anything. I just need to try my best and I try to give everything that I have and see how much I can gain or not,” he forecasted.
“You know, if it stays this position, anyway, you cannot gain anything if something happens. If you’re one or two positions up, then see if something happens, then you can gain something. So, at least one or two positions, I try to push and get back up [the leaderboard].”
