Sami Pajari led Delfi Rally Estonia from the first stage to the last. The championship leader finished sixth after opening the road.
Sami Pajari won 12 stages at Delfi Rally Estonia and led the rally from start to finish, beating Toyota team-mate Oliver Solberg by 19.5sec for a maiden World Rally Championship victory. He is the championship's 83rd different winner and the 17th different Finn to win a world rally outright, and the result hands Finland its 199th WRC victory.
Marko Salminen sat alongside him in a Hankook-equipped Toyota GR Yaris Rally1. Pajari took all seven stages on Friday, held a 14.7sec lead at the Friday evening halt, and started the two-stage final leg 25.0sec clear. Solberg went quicker on SS17 by 0.4sec, which was not enough to change anything, and Pajari drove the repeat pass of the 24.39km Kaariku test sixth quickest to close it out.
Estonia has now produced three maiden WRC winners in six years. Kalle Rovanpera took his first win here in 2021 and Solberg took his in 2025, and wrc.com places Pajari in that sequence explicitly. Three first-time victors at one event in six years is a pattern worth naming, though the mechanism behind it is not something any of the three results proves on its own.
The road order is the part the results do show
Elfyn Evans finished sixth. He leads the drivers' standings and he opened the road on day one, which on fast gravel means sweeping the loose surface off the racing line for everyone behind him. wrc.com attributes his result to exactly that, noting that opening the road on day one cost him a strong finish.
Takamoto Katsuta lost time twice in the same way. Tyre damage on Friday's penultimate stage dropped him out of contention, and he was further hampered by running first through Saturday. Two of the three drivers highest in the championship order therefore spent this rally cleaning the stage for the drivers chasing them, and Evans still extended his lead over Katsuta to 25 points because Katsuta suffered more.
Pajari started this rally third in the championship order behind that pair. Running position is a direct consequence of standings position under the WRC's road-order rules, so a quick driver seeded below the title contenders on a high-speed gravel event inherits a cleaner line through the fastest stages of the weekend. None of that diminishes a 12-stage-win performance. It does mean that "Estonia makes first-time winners" and "Estonia punishes whoever is leading the championship" are candidates for the same explanation.
Behind the leaders
Adrien Fourmaux began the final leg 1.9sec ahead of Hyundai team-mate Thierry Neuville and finished third. Neuville had gone quicker than Fourmaux on five stages on Saturday after transmission-setting changes to his i20 N Rally1, then lost 7.9sec on Sunday's opener, which left 9.8sec to recover on the Power Stage and no realistic way to do it. Neuville said afterwards he was nearly late starting the run because of work required on the car.
Solberg leaves with 27 points, one fewer than the 28 Pajari scored, having taken the Wolf Power Stage and topped the Super Sunday ranking. His second place was the Monte-Carlo winner's third podium of the season and ended a poor run, and his own summary of it was that he did not have the confidence to push to the limit the way Pajari did.
Sebastien Ogier finished fifth on his first Estonia appearance since 2021, one place ahead of Evans. Martins Sesks was the leading M-Sport Ford in seventh despite a 20sec penalty for an off in shakedown and a damaged front-right tyre on SS9. Esapekka Lappi took eighth on his first WRC outing since Safari Rally Kenya in March.
Robert Virves won WRC2 on home soil by 7.6sec in a Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 and collected a 25,000 euro prize from WRC Promoter as the event's top local talent. Teemu Suninen beat Roope Korhonen to second in class by 1.2sec on the Power Stage.
"It's something so amazing, maybe I didn't really realise what I've just done," Pajari said. He is 24, a six-time podium finisher this season, and now sits third in the standings on 144 points, 33 behind Evans.
Secto Rally Finland runs from July 30 to August 2 on gravel of similar character. Pajari will start it higher in the road order than he started this one.