You’ve seen the footage a dozen times or more by now. We know every grain of dust scattered along the Argentiera coastline that was involved in how that ttitle decider played out.
Instead, think bigger: what else did we learn from how the final round of the 2026 season played out?
Points system critics have run out of ammunition
For decades the points system was simple(ish): you get to the finish in position X, you score Y points. Nothing more to it. Keep it simple, right?
Imagine if it had been like this for Sardinia. Solberg would have gone into the rally thinking he had next to no hope. Knowing that with road order dynamics to consider and a track record of scoring big on Sundays that he could potentially carve double digits out of Evans’ lead in a single rally, Solberg gave it everything he had. He genuinely believed in the unlikely and, but for the penultimate corner of the rally, almost did it.
Why? Because the points system gave him an opportunity.
Sunday’s first three stages mattered greatly. There would have been no winner-takes-all powerstage duel (that was actually quite straightforward to understand) because Solberg would have been six points adrift heading onto the final stage. Evans would simply have needed to cruise it to the end. It would have been boring.
Yes, the outcome was the same – but we got a thrilling finale up there with Carlos Sainz’s Corolla breaking down at Margam Park in ’98 within sight of the finish.
All because we made the points system more ‘complicated’.
Rallying can still be about endurance
For Saturday and much of Sunday, it was starting to look like Evans’ consistency would yet again not be enough to become world champion.
Friday in Sardinia looked to have been his undoing: first on the road left him sixth after day one and put him in a troublesome road position for Saturday, which left him feeling “powerless” to do anything as Solberg dispatched the Hyundais to take the lead and set up an all-or-nothing final day.
Solberg turned the rally into a series of 17 sprints because he had no other cards to play and, ultimately, that maximum-push approach that had brought him into play for a last-gasp grab of the title away from Evans was his undoing two corners from the finish line.
You could argue that Solberg bottled it, that he pushed just that little bit too hard. The mistake was not really one that belonged to Sardinia, though: it was the mistake in Sweden. It was the stage one shunt in Croatia, or the penultimate stage shunt in Canarias. It was the slide onto the lip of a bank in Greece, the collision with a pole in Japan. He lost a mountain of points throughout the season from pushing too hard when it wasn’t entirely necessary, which left him no choice but to put it all on the line at the very end.
Evans was not without an unforced error in 2026: Kenya was self-inflicted and his Croatia off was ultimately a mistake by the crew in the car. But ultimately he endured. When the going got rough he kept his head and didn’t flinch. He may have ‘overdriven’ on that final stage of the season but, suffice to say, Solberg took overdriving to another level five minutes later.
Fourmaux is acting like a winner
There’s a common pattern in drivers before and after their first win: their confidence kicks up a gear, they’re more relaxed and the feeling comes naturally. They shift up a gear because they’ve gained the self-assurance they belong at the top.
Adrien Fourmaux has not cleared this threshold on paper. But listen to his words, look at his demeanour and, most importantly, look at his pace, and it’s as if he’s cleared the threshold already.
Rally winner Solberg was 2m38.6s faster than Fourmaux over the course of Sardinia’s 17 stages. Fourmaux lost 2m47.7s with the two punctures he sustained on Saturday. OK, he had a road order advantage on the first day, through which he’d managed to be 11.9s faster than Solberg, and Solberg lost around 10s with his powerstage escapade. But he was the only driver who was able to match Solberg’s pace over the course of the rally – all while Solberg was taking big risks to try and catch Evans.
There is no winners’ trophy in his cabinet at home yet, nut somehow he’s managed to go through the psychological process of becoming a winner without it anyway. If he can keep his hand in the game next season and line up a position as the talisman of Ford’s return to top-level rallying, a bright future remains ahead of him.
Neuville is not a spent force
There’s been this narrative around Thierry Neuville that his head’s dropped since becoming world champion. That he’s not quite the same driver anymore.
His performance on the Sardinia powerstage raises question marks. Him ultimately catching and passing his win-hungry, success-starved younger team-mate Adrien Fourmaux for the lead before his rally went awry suggests there is still pace locked away within him.
In all likelihood he won’t be competing at rallying’s top level next year. Hyundai has no ’27-era Rally1 car, either through a new build or a homologated kit. It is therefore unlikely he’ll be around full-time next year. But does that make Sardinia the beginning of the end? No. There remains evidence the underlying pace is still in there somewhere.
Hyundai still hasn’t made up its mind
This is a bit of a running theme with Hyundai. It was late to the party with Rally1 due to delays getting board sign-off for the project relative to Toyota and M-Sport. It has been on the fence about which way to go with its rallying future, aside from upgrading the i20 N Rally2 further with a ‘Step 3’ package.
There are two clues that suggest Hyundai is still on the fence on what it wants to do next year: Neuville’s speech at the powerstage finish and the FIA’s decision, communicated during the rally, that the deadline to register a ‘kit’ to bolster a Rally2 car into a Rally1-spec machine has been extended.
Will we see it in some capacity next year? Hard to say. Maybe. What about a new car for 2029? Never say never. Hyundai isn’t ‘in’ for 2027 in the same sense as Toyota – but that doesn’t mean it’s definitely out yet, either.
Virves is ready for the big time
Four WRC2 wins in row was already impressive enough, but Robert Virves’ Sardinia drive put beyond doubt that he is ready to ‘graduate’ to the top level – the only issue is lack of seats to achieve that goal.
Virves’ rally looked run by stage five. He’d dodged Dani Sordo’s Hyundai on SS3, then had to stop to change punctures on the next two stages. That left him 3m19.9s off the lead. This is usually fatal to any hope of a good result.
Yes, attrition (Emil Lindholm and Pablo Sarrazin) kicked in and helped him move up the leaderboard in terms of positions. But he was over three minutes off the lead. That is, ordinarily, unrecoverable.
He won eight out of 10 stages from Saturday morning onwards. He came 0.7s from winning the rally, having started the powerstage 6.8s behind Roope Korhonen.
The rally fraternity was all over Solberg’s crushing display of dominance in the Rally2 category last year. Here’s the thing: Virves’ Sardinia outing simply confirms his four-in-a-row performance earlier this year was no fluke. He has been in a class of his own in the second division this year. Were more manufacturers in play at the top level, a-la the early 2000s, he’d have a works deal for next season in his back pocket already.
It went under the radar because the world was focused on Evans versus Solberg. But Virves was as much the star performer in Sardinia as the Rally1-equipped title contenders.
