Pajari won Rally del Paraguay by staying out of the ditches everyone else found, and no crew has ever started a WRC win record like his.
Sami Pajari and Marko Salminen won Rally del Paraguay by 25.8 seconds on Sunday, and the record they set in doing it has no precedent in the championship's history: no crew had ever taken its first three WRC wins consecutively until this one. Estonia in July, Finland in August, Paraguay at the end of the same month, and a drivers' championship that read 30 points in Elfyn Evans' favour when the week began now reads 20, with three rounds left.
The rally was decided on Friday, and not by pace. Encarnacion's abrasive clay and gravel loops shredded the field's tyres in the opening leg: Takamoto Katsuta rolled on the first stage, Thierry Neuville stopped with broken rear suspension after a puncture, and Sebastien Ogier, last year's winner, retired in stage three with front left suspension damage after two punctures of his own. Hayden Paddon inherited the lead and held it for two stages until a stage six puncture took it from him; Evans led next and lost a minute to a right rear delamination in stage seven, driving through it rather than stopping. Pajari, hampered only by a morning water leak, avoided every one of those traps and ended the day 11.9 seconds clear. Nobody got closer again.
Hankook's own account of Friday confirms the surface did the sorting. The supplier's motorsport manager Steven Cho told DirtFish that the roads proved more abrasive than the company expected, and that its loose surface range runs to two compounds of the same Dynapro across events as different as Estonia's sand and Paraguay's clay. Friday's nine stages produced punctures or delaminations for at least six Rally1 crews, and three crews were out of the leg after only three stages. Twenty two stages were scheduled across the weekend; twenty one ran, the missing one being Sunday's red flagged Artigas test. A tyre conversation that began as Friday grumbling now has a full rally of evidence behind it.
Rain was forecast to make Saturday worse, and instead it made a point about preparation: the storm hit the Encarnacion service park rather than the stages, destroying temporary structures while crews who had gambled on wet weather setups drove dry roads all day. Pajari stretched the lead to 24.1 seconds despite ripping part of the rear wing off his GR Yaris in a stage 11 ditch, and on Sunday he managed the gap, conceding a few seconds on the opening Encarnacion test and taking them back over the next two stages. His winning time was 3h13m28.5s.
Paddon's second place carried a longer arc than the winner's. This was his first top level WRC gravel start since 2018, his fourth start of the season, and he was the closest challenger from Friday evening to the finish, even clawing seconds back on the final morning. "A lot of people had written us off," he said at the finish, and a part time entrant splitting the factory field is the kind of result that ends that conversation for a while.
Adrien Fourmaux drove the weekend's other recovery. He stood 1m51.3s from the lead after Friday's double rear puncture, won five of Saturday's nine stages to close a 55 second deficit to Evans down to 3.3, passed the championship leader on Sunday's opening stage, and finished third, 5.1 seconds clear of him. One housekeeping note belongs on the record here: RACER's own classification table lists Evans third, contradicting its own prose. Toyota's provisional final classification settles it, putting Fourmaux third at plus 40.0s and Evans fourth at plus 45.1s, and that is the version PN carries.
Evans' fourth place is the quiet story with the loudest consequences. He entered Paraguay holding a 30 point cushion and left with 20 of it, having watched the junior driver in his own team win a third consecutive rally while he lost a podium on the final morning. The drivers' table now reads Evans 216, Pajari 196, Oliver Solberg 175, and the series goes straight to another all gravel event, Rally Chile, on 10 to 13 September. Solberg salvaged fifth after a Friday that included an engine cut while leading, a spectator push start and a puncture; Toyota's own release confirms both of the weekend's bonus results, which were single sourced all Sunday: Solberg won the Wolf Power Stage, and Ogier, running under restart rules, took the full five Super Sunday points after sharing the winning time with Solberg and holding the tiebreak on the day's opening stage.
Toyota's day ended one trophy short of where it could have. The manufacturers' title was available in Paraguay, and Hyundai's double podium kept it open: Toyota leaves on 554 points to Hyundai's 381, a lead its own release puts at 173 with 180 still available across the last three rounds. Takamoto Katsuta had the worst of it either way. His rally ended twice, first with the Friday roll, then with a heavy crash on stage 21 that had the stage red flagged and cancelled; he and co-driver Aaron Johnston were taken to hospital for precautionary checks and released the same afternoon. Katsuta's own account puts the blame nowhere near the tyres that defined the weekend: "I lost the rear of the car, I tried to correct it and we hit a small bank on the inside that lifted the car onto two wheels. I still tried to save it but we rolled. It was my mistake."
Diego Dominguez gave the event its home story. The Paraguayan won WRC2 in a GR Yaris Rally2, finished seventh overall, 22.7 seconds clear of Gus Greensmith in class, and did it days after a send off from President Santiago Pena. Alejandro Galanti completed the class podium behind Greensmith for a second home result, with Junior WRC graduate Taylor Gill fourth in class in a Skoda. Josh McErlean equalled his best WRC finish with sixth overall for M-Sport, driving the final day with a gear lever held together by a 10mm spanner, the sort of detail this rally seemed designed to produce.
What Paraguay did not produce is any reason to expect a quiet run-in. Pajari's own read on the title, given to his team after the finish, was "it's still quite a few points to catch but I will just keep doing the best job that I can", which is a fair description of 20 points and three rallies. Solberg sits 41 from the lead in third and Katsuta fourth on 160, and Rally Chile runs 10 to 13 September on the same kind of gravel that just rewarded the one driver who kept all four tyres intact.