Rally Islas Canarias brought a challenge unique in the World Rally Championship: pure, unblemished and mostly smooth asphalt: for one weekend, the WRC’s best had to drive as if they were circuit racing but with pacenotes.
Who coped best with a return to stages not seen since Rally Spain’s previous iteration in Catalunya three years earlier, and who struggled to make an impression?
These are DirtFish’s (Rally1) driver rankings from Rally Islas Canarias 2025.
10 Josh McErlean
Neither M-Sport driver was happy with the package their team brought to Gran Canaria, suffering in a similar manner to the Hyundais in not being able to trust the front end, in part due to the component choices made ahead of the rally.
McErlean went to extremes on car setup to find something that would revitalize his confidence in consistently finding the limit of the Puma, at one point softening the car up so severely that he’d disconnected the front anti-roll bar entirely – usually reserved for when it’s raining and stability is needed over theoretical maximum performance.
Every rally this year presents McErlean with a mountain to climb. That said, he failed to clear the minimum benchmark expected of a Rally1 driver, being outpaced by the top Rally2 drivers (Yohan Rossel and Alejandro Cachón) and on the final morning he ran wide into an armco barrier, ending his rally.
He was also 0.5s/km off the pace of team-mate Grégoire Munster for most of the rally – a bigger deficit than between fellow rookie Sami Pajari and his all-conquering Toyota team-mate Kalle Rovanperä (0.4s/km).
9 Grégoire Munster
Munster was lucky to finish the rally without at the very least retiring and returning under super rally, massively overestimating how late he could brake for a tightening right-hander on the Arucas test and getting stuck for three minutes. Spectators being nearby to come and push the car out of a ditch was also some positive luck.
It was a miserable weekend for Munster who, like McErlean, spent all weekend chasing a setup that made him trust that the front-end would work. His Puma simply couldn’t unlock the grip available from the new Hankook hard-compound tires, sliding his way through corners.His poor pace was not for a lack of trying, with Fourmaux directly behind him on the road during Saturday’s stages saying: “I think the Ford in front of us was really pushing, the lines were crazy.”
While no slight against the rally itself, Munster was sick of Gran Canaria by the finish, declaring he’d rather be “anywhere but here.”
8 Sami Pajari
Pajari has the luxury of using 2025 as a learning season, without the pressure (so far) of scoring manufacturer points for the ‘main’ Toyota team. He has the freedom to make the odd error here and there while discovering the limits of the GR Yaris Rally1.
Until stage 12 of the rally he was performing very well relative to his past Rally1 experience, outpacing senior team-mate Takamoto Katsuta throughout and staying within a tenth of a second per kilometer of championship leader Elfyn Evans.
But, as had been the case in Central European Rally late last season, that strong performance was undone by a trip off the road. In CER he’d smashed into a drainage ditch with the front-right; this time it was one of the many armco barriers which line Gran Canaria’s mountain roads.
The degree of damage is mostly irrelevant; the rally’s roads are infamous for being incredibly punishing for reasonably minor errors. He admitted that he’d simply carried too much speed into the corner – but considering he’d already done one pass of the stage to confirm his notes were up to scratch, conditions were consistent and predictable and the car was working well, it wasn’t an understandable rookie error, it was an avoidable one.
7 Ott Tänak
It’s rare that an Ott Tänak performance could ever be described as anonymous. In his earlier career he was known for a win-it-or-bin-it attitude. Given Hyundai’s dramatic pace deficit to Toyota on Islas Canarias, he had little to hope for in terms of result – but that led him to being less up for the fight than his teammates.
While Fourmaux and Neuville ramped up their efforts as they found Sunday setups that helped mask some of the i20’s fundamental issues, Tänak didn’t give off an impression that he especially cared about winning the “Hyundai Cup,” as Fourmaux had christened their intra-team battle.
Of all the Hyundai drivers he was the least able to wring performance out of the ill-handling i20, with his teammates adapting better to the challenging circumstances.
6 Takamoto Katsuta
Fourth place is a solid result on paper and after a final-stage rollover that cost him the same position on Safari Rally Kenya, Katsuta was keen to deliver a clean, solid performance to restore his confidence.
That said, he was also the slowest of the five Toyota drivers throughout the rally, marginally outpaced by his junior teammate Pajari until the young Finn’s crash. He was not at ease with the car and appeared more sensitive than his teammates to changeable conditions where low clouds lingered and brought occasional patches of moisture to the roads.
Katsuta delivered a solid if unspectacular performance. But if Hyundai had gotten its pre-event preparation nailed on, he would likely have struggled to finish in the top five with the pace he demonstrated.
5 Thierry Neuville
It’s hard to separate Neuville and Fourmaux in the rankings, as both at least tried to make a go of the “Hyundai Cup”.
A puncture on the rally’s penultimate stage left him last of the i20 N Rally1s but that didn’t really reflect his performance; until that point he’d been closing in on Fourmaux for fifth place, despite being one step firmer in the choice of differentials available to him relative to the Frenchman and thus less able to activate the Hankook hard compound.
Being the man to beat on Sundays was key to his run to the title last season and he demonstrated more of that trait on Islas Canarias, having been able to improve the balance of his i20 a little more at morning service before the final day’s action. In a situation where Tänak had struggled to motivate himself to vacuum up leftover crumbs from Toyota’s table, Neuville at least tried to make the best of a bad situation.
4 Adrien Fourmaux
That he’d even been able to entertain himself by creating the “Hyundai Cup” and spend half the event talking about how beautiful Gran Canaria was is testament to his mentality on this rally. Against a backdrop of a pace deficit to Toyota and no way to comprehensively fix the problem, he still got stuck in anyway.
He’d been pre-event favorite to lead the way of Hyundai’s trio, given both his strong form on asphalt at the season opener and being the only previous Rally Islas Canarias winner in the Rally1 field. Fourmaux was also helped by having a slightly more optimal set of components available to fit to his car relative to Neuville and Tänak. But, all things considered, he’s still the young hotshot in that team up against two world champions and he beat them both.
The only real blot on his copybook was going the wrong way on setup come Friday afternoon, which cost him the chance to remain in the battle between the rear-gunning Toyotas. But the time loss on the Friday afternoon loop was less than his deficit to Katsuta at the finish, so it’s still unlikely he could have done better than fifth at the finish.
3 Elfyn Evans
Much was expected of championship leader Evans on Rally Islas Canarias. He was on a run of six podium results on asphalt and hadn’t finished lower than second place since last year’s Acropolis Rally in early September.
In equal equipment to the protagonists of the rally, he fell short – something he admitted himself and expressed frustration with. But there was always an element of trying to chase that last one percent not being worth the risk, considering the comfortable lead in the championship he’d already amassed.
That he lost 14 points of his advantage in the title race speaks less about his own performance and more to how superlative Rovanperä was. Ogier, who had the edge on Evans throughout as well, only accrued four more points on Islas Canarias.
It wasn’t a vintage performance by any stretch of the imagination – but it was sufficient, and had one of either Rovanperä or Ogier ran into strife, would have slotted into place and helped pick up maximum points for Toyota regardless. Job done.
2 Sébastien Ogier
Ogier once again had the measure of Evans on asphalt, the performance gap between the pair proving to be wider on the hard-compound Hankooks in Gran Canaria than on the softs that were prevalent in Monte Carlo.
Ultimately he was a clear second-best on Rally Islas Canarias. There were a few moments where he wasn’t able to optimize performance fully, complaining the balance of the car wasn’t quite right on a couple of mornings and also admitting he wasn’t willing to take maximum risk on certain stages, given the phase of his career he’s now reached.
In almost any other set of circumstances, it was likely a good enough performance to either win or be in the thick of the fight for first place. But – and it feels extraordinary to say this out loud – Ogier was simply outclassed on pure, raw performance by his own teammate.
1 Kalle Rovanperä
There will never be an easier pick to sit atop a rally rankings list. To say Rovanperä was in a class of his own would be an understatement. It was more like he was the only one that had shown up, and the rest were still stuck on the Spanish mainland waiting to start the long boat ride to Gran Canaria.
His performance was reminiscent of those during his title-winning years, where winning stages outwardly looked effortless. And to an extent, it was. His run through the first pass of the Tejeda – San Mateo test was the final confirmation that the only way anyone would take a stage win away from him is if he’d let them. After demolishing his own teammates by around nine seconds, he declared he hadn’t even been pushing.
It is to his credit that an event widely praised for the quality of its roads now suffers being tarred with the ‘boring’ brush – because the stupendousness of his performance eliminated any hope of a lead battle forming in the first place.
Is he ‘back’? It’s too early to tell for sure. But his pace on Safari Rally Kenya suggested the headaches he faced adapting to the soft-compound asphalt Hankooks and the snow tire are less likely to be an issue on gravel. And he’s starting to figure out how to maximise the GR Yaris with its altered balance sans-hybrid.
