TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team intends to build on its strong start to the 2025 FIA World Rally Championship season when the snow and ice of Rally Sweden hosts round two on February 13-16.
TGR-WRT began the defence of its manufacturers’ championship title with a maximum points haul and a one-two finish at January’s Rallye Monte-Carlo, where Sébastien Ogier claimed a record-extending 10th victory on the iconic season opener.
With Ogier contesting a partial schedule of rallies and not present in Sweden, it is team-mate Elfyn Evans who effectively leads the fight for the drivers’ title and will be opening the road on an event where he scored his first win with the team in 2020. Third on the road will be Kalle Rovanperä, who took victory in Sweden in 2022. Completing the team’s manufacturer line-up is Takamoto Katsuta, who has also gone strongly in Sweden previously, while Sami Pajari represents TGR-WRT2 on his first full winter rally in Rally1 machinery.
TGR-WRT will still enter a total of five GR YARIS Rally1 cars in Sweden, with Lorenzo Bertelli taking part in one of his favourite rallies through the team’s customer programme for the third consecutive year.
Considered the WRC’s only pure winter event, Rally Sweden holds good memories for TGR-WRT as the scene of its first ever victory back in 2017, when current Team Principal Jari-Matti Latvala was behind the wheel. In 2022 the rally moved north to Umeå, the largest city in northern Sweden and a short trip across the Gulf of Bothnia from Finland where TGR-WRT is based. The new location – closer to the Arctic Circle than to the capital city Stockholm – has helped ensure extreme winter conditions and also brought even faster roads. Special studded tyres that bite into the surface make it one the quickest rallies of the season, with drivers ‘leaning’ their cars on snowbanks by the sides of the road to carry more speed through corners.
The rally starts on Thursday evening with a short ‘sprint’ stage in Umeå, which will be run again on Friday after two loops of three stages separated by a mid-day service. Saturday’s format is similar but concludes with a double-length version of the Umeå stage – which also serves as the rally-ending Power Stage on Sunday when it follows two passes of the Västervik test.
Seven GR Yaris Rally2 cars will take part in WRC2 with the entry list led by Oliver Solberg, who begins his seven-round championship campaign with the Printsport team on his home event. Others to watch include Georg Linnamäe, who finished on the class podium with the RedGrey team in 2024, plus the Rautio Motorsport duo of Roope Korhonen and Tuukka Kauppinen, the latter fresh from winning the Arctic Rally. Rally Sweden regular Michał Sołowow joins Solberg under the Printsport awning.
The TGR WRC Challenge Program’s second-generation drivers Hikaru Kogure and Yuki Yamamoto also begin their WRC2 campaigns in a pair of GR Yaris Rally2 cars, while third-generation duo Shotaro Goto and Takumi Matsushita make their WRC3 debuts in Renault Clio Rally3 machinery.
