Pajari closes in on third straight WRC win as Rally Paraguay bites back
Sami Pajari carried a 24.1-second lead into the final day of Rally Paraguay, standing five stages from a third consecutive World Rally Championship victory after a brutal weekend that saw championship contenders crash, puncture and improvise their way to the finish.
Pajari, driving for Toyota Gazoo Racing, had begun Saturday 11.9 seconds clear and more than doubled that advantage despite damaging the rear wing of his GR Yaris (WRC.com). Adrien Fourmaux turned up the pressure through Saturday's stages, but the Finn held firm. His rally lead had already changed hands four times on Friday as the championship front-runners hit trouble on the rough Paraguayan roads — only the second time the country has appeared on the WRC calendar (Reuters).
Pajari's rise has been sudden. The 2024 WRC 2 champion — rallying's second-tier series — took his breakthrough top-flight win at Rally Estonia in July, then followed it with victory on home Finnish roads. An eighth-place finish in the 2025 drivers' standings now looks like a floor, not a ceiling.
The championship picture coming into Paraguay had Elfyn Evans leading Pajari's Toyota team-mate by 30 points, with Takamoto Katsuta a further 41 behind (Taipei Times). Katsuta's weekend summed up the rally's capacity for cruelty. He and co-driver Aaron Johnston rolled their Toyota at high speed on Sunday's penultimate stage — their second crash of the weekend. The stage was stopped. Both crew members were confirmed okay but taken to hospital as a precaution (BBC Sport).
Further down the order, 26-year-old M-Sport Ford driver Josh McErlean equalled his career-best WRC result of sixth. He had run as high as second on Friday before a puncture damaged his podium chances. Then, on Sunday, a broken gear stick forced a roadside fix: McErlean lashed a spanner to the lever to complete the rally. It is the kind of repair that sums up rallying's grass-roots character — the driver as mechanic, the show going on because someone in the car has a tool and a plan.
McErlean's team-mate Jon Armstrong was less fortunate. Running seventh with three stages remaining, he clipped a bank and ripped the rear off his Ford Puma Rally1. He and co-driver Shane Byrne were forced to retire. Armstrong and Byrne had also been among several crews hit by tyre problems on Friday's opening leg.
What makes this rally stand out is the sheer breadth of misfortune across the field. Punctures, crashes, broken components — Paraguay's combination of rough gravel and committed pace chewed through cars and tyres alike. For Pajari, the reward for surviving it all was a position no one in the sport could have predicted three months ago: within touching distance of a third straight win, and a championship lead that may be next.
