Look up the phrase ‘slow burner’ in a dictionary of your choice, and you should be presented with: Rally Islas Canarias 2026.
For the first three days, it was… stale. For the final four stages, it improved nicely.
Oliver Solberg’s pursuit of Sébastien Ogier, coupled with a shift in the skies, made for a blockbuster finish that then waned after Solberg faltered on the second-to-last stage.
Here’s what we learned from Rally Islas Canarias 2026.
Solberg digs himself a hole
The last thing Oliver Solberg needed after a stage one crash in Croatia was another blunder in Gran Canaria.
Ah.
So much of Solberg’s Rally Islas Canarias was superb. He had Elfyn Evans beaten for pace and was slowly reeling in Ogier before that fateful crest, which hid the impending Armco, stole Solberg’s 17 (at minimum) championship points from him.
He insists he wasn’t doing anything crazy, and the split times support that. At the last comparable point, Ogier was up on Solberg by 0.6. But should Solberg have been focusing on Ogier at all?
That’s the question he and those around him now have to ponder. As Malcolm Wilson famously said, it’s far better for a driver to be fast and make mistakes than have to find raw pace, but Solberg badly needs a clean weekend in Portugal.
Fortunately, he only has to wait until next week to put that right.
Epic championship race in store
There’s an air of predictability about Elfyn Evans finding himself atop the championship standings ahead of the season’s first European gravel round, but not in how he’s got here.
Second and first in Monte and Sweden, yes. Two retirements in Kenya and Croatia, definitely not. Second – and full Sunday and powerstage points – was more like it in Gran Canaria, but Evans knew his time loss on Friday cost him a genuine shot at victory.
The poisoned chalice is he now has to contest Portugal first on the road, and due to its itinerary he’ll tackle 10 stages in that position, too. That’s not so bad if he had a large championship advantage, but he’s only got two points in-hand over Takamoto Katsuta.
Sami Pajari is now up to third in the championship too, four points clear of Solberg who trails Evans by 33. The picture is far from balanced as the season tilts towards its period where road position really will make a difference.
Will the hare overhaul the tortoise? And don’t forget the wily old fox, reigning champion Ogier, disrupting play as best he can too.
Hyundai even worse in Canarias this year
Nobody was expecting Hyundai to challenge in Gran Canaria, but it was still rather depressing to watch it all play out. What we ended up with last week were three ‘cups’ reserved for each manufacturer.
The alarming thing for Hyundai, though, is it actually regressed relative to last year’s Rally Islas Canarias. Adrien Fourmaux won the ‘Hyundai Cup’ in 2025 and finished 0.5s/km down on the rally-winning Toyota. This year, that deficit grew to 0.74s/km.
Yikes.
But aside from Japan in a months’ time, Tarmac is dealt with. Gravel beckons, and Hyundai insiders – namely sporting director Andrew Wheatley and Fourmaux – are teasing and promising big things from Rally Portugal.
Bring it on, because it’s a bad situation for the WRC to have a team winning every single stage of a rally and locking out the top-five (when it had five cars running) on all but two of the non-superspecial stages.
Armstrong suffers first Rally1 setback
A blip was always expected in Jon Armstrong’s strong maiden season as a Rally1 driver, and it occurred in Canarias.
The characteristics of the event meant expecting a repeat of Armstrong’s stage win-challenging pace wasn’t realistic, but he was covered off at every turn by team-mate Josh McErlean last week
To McErlean’s credit he stepped up in Canarias and delivered both a much-needed clean weekend and an upturn in pace relative to 2025, while Armstrong struggled to get his head around the specifities of the Hankook rubber and suffered two major near-misses as a result.
The second – where he drove down into a ravine but was pulled back onto the road by spectators – clearly knocked his confidence and made it a definite weekend to forget.
The focus is now on Armstrong’s gravel pace, which he himself has said he’s not sure of given the unique nature of Safari Rally Kenya earlier this season.
Rossel becoming too good for WRC2
Monte Carlo was a disaster, retiring on the opening stage on Lancia’s highly-hyped return to the WRC, but Yohan Rossel has atoned for that beautifully with back-to-back WRC2 victories in Croatia and now Canarias.
But forget the championship permutations (although it is cool that Yohan shares the current points lead with his Citroën-driving brother Léo), it’s the quality of the drives that’s intriguing.
It definitely wasn’t easy last week, but Rossel made it look so – in quite a similar manner to how Oliver Solberg used to in a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2.
Gravel, and next week’s Rally Portugal, will act as the true litmus test of that claim, but Rossel’s made no secret of his ambition to compete with the very best at the very top in the future.
Whether he can next year depends on how performance parity between Rally1 and Rally2 prevails in 2027, but Solberg acts as strong evidence that standing out in today’s WRC2 field bodes well for making an impression in the overall fight, too.
