The demanding Rally Japan, the final round of this year's FIA World Rally Championship, brought five Škoda crews to finish in the top ten. The performance of the home crew Arai/Matsuo was exceptional, they achieved their historic success. Oliver Solberg, who did not compete in Japan, then finished second in the WRC2 championship.
Solberg, who competed in a Fabia RS Rally2 of the Toksport WRT team this year, kept his WRC2 title hopes alive ahead of the Rally Japan. However, having already completed his selected 7 scoring events, he did not start in Japan and had to wait to see how his rivals would fare. In the end, they did well and Solberg finished second in the championship.
The asphalt Rally Japan turned into a very demanding event. Several competitors were caught off guard by the slippery stages and found themselves in trouble. For example, Gus Greensmith and co-driver Jonas Andersson of Toksport WRT basically drove the entire rally in a chase when they went off the road in the third stage.
"In a slippery corner, I lost the rear of the car while braking and it hit an embankment," Greensmith explained the puncture of the right front of the Škoda Fabia RS Rally2.
A loss of a minute and a half meant a drop in the standings to seventh place, but Greensmith and Andersson gradually climbed back to fourth place. In the championship, this meant the final seventh place for them.
Local heroes Hiroki Arai and Shunsuke Matsuo from the Ahead Japan Racing team, who started with a Škoda Fabia Rally2, finished one place ahead of them. Unlike many of their rivals, the home duo avoided problems on the road and the result was third place, which is their best ever finish in a FIA World Rally Championship event. Unfortunately, in the end, the reigning Japanese champions could not attack the higher positions because of problems with the rear differential on their car.
The Polish crew of Kajetan Kajetanowicz and Maciej Szczepaniak finished fifth in the rally with the Fabia RS Rally2. They also struggled, losing engine power on Friday due to damaging the exhaust of their special while turning. However, the RaceSeven mechanics repaired the car and Kajetanowicz's good points haul earned him fifth place overall in the WRC2 championship standings and third place in the WRC2 Challenger category.
Two other Škoda crews finished in the top ten: Daniel Chwist/Kamil Heller from Poland and the local crew of Osamu Fukunaga/Misako Saida. Outside the WRC2 standings, i.e. only in the RC2 category, the crew of Josh McErlean/James Fulton also started. Even they did not avoid complications when McErlean crashed into a tree stump during a pass. This resulted in a fourteenth place overall in the RC2 category. McErlean finished ninth in the final WRC2 championship standings.
In it, the crew of Oliver Solberg/Elliott Edmondson, who competed with the Fabia RS Rally2 this year, kept their title hopes alive until the end of the Japanese rally. Solberg had already completed his seven points-scoring events, so he only watched the events in Japan from afar and had to wait to see how his rivals would turn out. Their success eventually meant second place in the championship for the Toksport WRT driver.
In the end, six crews with Škoda cars finished in the top ten. In addition to those already mentioned (2. Solberg, 5. Kajetanowicz, 7. Greensmith, 9. McErlean) Lauri Joona (6th place) and Robert Virves (10th place) also placed well.
