From $0 to a WRC2 program in three months

Being single-minded isn’t often seen as a good thing.

It can make you too selfish, too stubborn, too obsessed. In most scenarios, it’s not something you’d wish to hear yourself described as.

But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s needed. Sometimes, just sometimes, that relentless focus on the target is the defining element in making the impossible possible.

The man on the other end of the phone is living proof of it.

Having missed out on a prize package worth hundreds of thousands of euros, all for the sake of a meagre 1.6 seconds, I wouldn’t have blamed him for feeling spent with rallying. Would you?

But that’s not a champion’s mindset. Nothing worth having comes easy, and if there’s one thing we unquestionably now know about Taylor Gill, it’s that he wants this. Badly.

In little over three months, the Australian’s gone from having absolutely nothing to a three-event WRC2 program in a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2. Rest assured, that doesn’t just happen by chance. That’s happened because Gill’s put his heart and soul into carrying on his dream in the World Rally Championship.

“It’s the challenge we were hoping for, but it’s not a small deal I guess,” Gill tells DirtFish. “A lot of work has gone into making this happen; a lot, a lot of work.”

Gill’s two seasons in Junior WRC, where he won three events, enabled him to show the world his capabilities and build up the relationships and contacts needed to help him in his quest. He also benefits from loyal supporters in Australia, but the funds required to compete against the world’s best drivers in Rally2 isn’t exactly pocket change.

“Financially, as far as trying to build a season, we were starting with zero,” Gill says. “So we’ve had to build it up step by step.

“I’m lucky to have lots of loyal sponsors from Australia, but the way the market is over there it’s difficult to find one big sponsor, so it’s piecing together lots and lots of smaller ones, which is challenging then to manage.

“Every day I’ve been checking the Excel spreadsheet going ‘have we got enough?’ The price of the tires, the price of the fuel… I mean I’ve done all those orders myself as well as the entry. We’ve now got quite big support from Ferratum, which is a Finnish company. So they basically, in a way, laid down the foundation for us to then, you know, try and build up the rest of the funding to get these three events off the ground.”

No professional athlete is content unless they’re winning – and even then, there’s always something more they feel they could have done or could be doing. But in this case, when it would’ve been easy to save himself the hassle and accept it maybe wasn’t meant to be, to dig this deep and rescue his own career at just 22 years old must be a source of pride?

“Yeah, for sure, yeah,” Gill reflects. “It’s probably bang on what you said. For me, there’s a big sense of pride, and I think it’ll come more also when I see the car stickered up and at the start line that we’ve been able to put all this together, because if I look, two weeks after Central Europe sitting at home in Australia, for sure you have these thoughts of like ‘well, is there even any point? We’re not going to be able to make anything happen.’

“But then you’ve just got to kind of forget it and try and build up. And that was basically our thought process anyway: I’m going to throw the kitchen sink at trying to get a few WRC events off the ground and, you know, if it goes well and leads onto something, anything, then great, and if it doesn’t go well and that’s it, then OK, at least we can go home knowing that we tried our hardest and didn’t just give up for losing.”

The hard part is done, but the crucial part is to come. Gill’s created himself the chance to perform, now he’s got to do so.

Without the finances to contest a full championship, he’s been clever in the events he’s chosen. Sweden, Croatia and Finland aren’t just events he’s experienced before, but rallies he’s won in his class. They’re also all on different surfaces, therefore maximizing his chances of impressing the watching world.

But Rally2, and the WRC2 field, remains a big unknown.

Gill got the first taste of his new ride on Thursday, and admitted the car was driving him to begin with before he began to find his comfort. Considering he also doesn’t know how he stacks up against his rivals, deciding what he thinks is achievable this week in Sweden – and whether that’s the same as what he wants to achieve – is no easy feat.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a very tricky question because we have kind of zero reference of where we could stack up. OK, some of the guys we’ve competed against before, but you know, when everyone goes to WRC2, the levels lift and change.

“Romet [Jürgenson] is the most obvious example, but I think the Romet we competed against in the Junior WRC is now very different to the Romet we’ll compete against in WRC2. So it’s very hard to base ourselves.

“OK, looking at the entry list, if we could be in the top five, that’d be quite a good result, I’d say, considering the people that are there. And I think we’re the eighth or ninth seeded WRC2 car, so it’s a bit of a step from our start position. But yeah, who knows? It’s probably better to ask me the question after shakedown.”

Gil is clear, though, that he doesn’t have any extra motivation to beat Mille Johansson, who starts his first event in M-Sport’s Ford Fiesta Rally2. Johansson is the one who denied Gill the Junior WRC title just four months ago.

“I’m not looking at Mille in particular or even Romet and saying ‘I really, really want to beat those guys’ because at the end I’m a competitor so I want to beat everyone.

“I’m not really focused on any particular person based on any previous history or last year’s chairmanship in the Juniors or anything, I’m just going to go there and do the best job I can and yeah, like I said, the aim is always to try and beat everyone. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they come from.”

Ultimately, Gill’s mission is to keep himself in everybody’s minds ahead of 2027, where the WRC landscape is set to change with a new regulation ruleset.

“There’s still a bit of unknown of what the sport’s going to look like, but when you come from Australia, if we disappeared for 2026, it’s basically impossible to come back,” Gill shares.

“So we’ll do a few events, keep our name there in the circles in WRC2, and then let’s see what happens. Then it’s hopes and dreams from there!”

Hopes and dreams they may be for now, but there was a time Gill’s participation in 2026 was exactly the same. And yet, he’s made that happen.