With every setback comes opportunity. Let it define you, or let it redefine what’s possible.
Take a guess which camp Taylor Gill belongs to.
The final stage of last year’s Central European Rally could’ve killed the Australian’s career. The 8.6 seconds he lost to Mille Johansson didn’t just cost Gill the Junior WRC title, but crucially the six-figure WRC2 prize package that came with it.
With the FIA Rally Star program winding down at the end of 2025, there was no lifeline. No alternative. Gill was left with nothing.
“I knew the deal,” he tells DirtFish today. “It was there in black and white that if I win the championship, I get the opportunity. If I don’t win the championship, I don’t have the opportunity.”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but you sense that galling miss might just have been the making of Gill.
Gill could've been driving a paid-for Ford Fiesta Rally2 in 2026, but instead went the Toyota route
Sure, the chance to compete for M-Sport (free of charge) in WRC2 this year would hardly have been awful for his career prospects. But this way, he’s been able to show off a critical character trait that could, one day, prove the difference between success and failure.
Resilience.
Ending 2025 with $0, the 22-year-old scraped budget together to tackle Rally Sweden, Croatia and Finland in a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2. And now that’s unlocked two golden tickets in South America with a Toksport Škoda.
“I bite off more than we can chew and then absolutely chew like hell,” Gill grins. “I started Rally Sweden and I only had about half the budget to do Croatia, and then I started Croatia and I had zero budget to do Finland…
“Between the events I’ve really been working like hell and I’ve had some really good key people come up and help at the right moments basically, but yeah I mean it’s been it’s been a crazy year as far as raising the budget.
“I’ve spent, what, 9-10 days so far competing in WRC rallies this year and we’re at the end of August. So it’s such a small part, but that’s what everything revolves around basically.”
Gill has impressed on the stages, finishing fourth in Sweden and winning a stage in Croatia – completing the second leg as the second-quickest driver behind event winner Yohan Rossel.
But he’s only unlocked that platform through dogged determination and single-minded focus to make it happen. The word ‘impossible’ isn’t in Gill’s vocabulary.
Throughout this year he’s been “head down bum up” raising budget in Australia, and also working as a normal car mechanic to earn money to live off throughout the year.
He moved back to Finland where he had an apartment, but his visa to live there expired in March meaning he had to give that up in August, the week after Rally Finland, and relocate to the UK.
There, he began couch surfing with family friends and then his engineer, just so he could keep the dream alive.
Thierry Neuville and Takamoto Katsuta prepared for Paraguay from their homes in Monaco; Gill from a mate’s couch he’d scored for a few nights.
“I think it’s quite clear how much I want this,” he says, “and to be honest, sometimes I almost have to reality check myself in a way because people say kind of what you just said: that it’s crazy what you’re doing and the lengths you’re going to to make it all happen.
Gill is working harder than most to keep himself behind the wheel
“But I mean for me it’s all I’ve ever wanted so it’s a bit like… I don’t want to say it’s just a matter of fact. But I want to make the career, this is what I have to do. And this is what many guys have done before me, so it’s just part of the journey.
“It’s funny because, to give you an insight, Dan [Brkic co-driver] and I were having this kind of conversation when we were packing up our apartment in Finland, and he was kind of saying ‘This has been quite cool’.
“Like three or four years ago, he was saying, ‘I never thought that I’d be living in Finland and rallying and doing the world championship and whatever’.
“And I mean, to me, it’s the same. Maybe a few years ago I didn’t think that I’d be here either, but then in the same token it’s always been my dream to compete in the world championship, and to compete in the world championship moving overseas is part of that.
“So somehow it’s again a little bit matter of fact in a way.”
Gill has been very good at building relationships throughout his time in the WRC too, which paid dividends last week when he was able to test Lauri Joona’s Škoda before the upcoming South American double-header in Paraguay and Chile.
Joona previously served as his route note crew in Croatia, too.
Toksport have the association with Škoda so it's no coincidence why we're trying to get the opportunity thereTaylor Gill
And just to prove his work ethic: since our conversation, Gill managed to add Chile to his program, with the original deal only for Paraguay.
Everything he’s achieved in a car, and the work he’s put in outside the car, has led to this moment: working in association with a manufacturer. The next two events present a huge opportunity for Gill; now he must make the most of it.
“Yeah exactly,” he agrees. “Obviously Toksport have the association with Škoda so it’s no coincidence why we’re trying to get the opportunity there.
“It’s all good, well and fun to run things privately with the Yaris how we’ve been doing, but when you’re trying to push for opportunities, you see what [Robert] Virves has done for example a couple of years ago privately running a Škoda and then getting a few more events here and a few more events there, and then getting an opportunity with Toksport and Škoda before having the season of his life this year in WRC2.
“I don’t want to say that we’re trying to copy that model, but there’s been other drivers that have taken the same sort of route. If you look also Sami [Pajari] did, I think he did three or four events with Toksport in 2022 and then the following year he had a full season basically.”
How will Gill fare with his Škoda switch? It's a move made with a clear plan in mind
Despite the obvious need to impress, Gill is remaining “realistic” as he’s never tackled either event before. He says he should be looking at the top five in Paraguay.
“This is the kind of opportunity that we were working towards this year,” he adds. “Our aim of this program was to do these three rallies and hope that these kind of opportunities present themselves.
“We’ve had to work a lot to get the opportunity to come up, but yeah it’s proved that our idea of doing these three rallies has worked so far.
“It’s all about trying to get the connections, and obviously, at the end of the day, it all comes back to having strong events. That’s the main focus.”
I think we can agree the last thing defining Gill is that CER powerstage.
