Kalle Rovanperä walked away from two rally titles to chase Formula 1, then a benign inner-ear condition stalled the move within months. Toyota now has a target for his return: 2027..
Kalle Rovanperä, 25, won the World Rally Championship in 2022 and 2023, then left it after the 2025 season to chase circuit racing and, eventually, Formula 1. The gamble stalled almost before it began: in March he withdrew from his planned Super Formula season in Japan with an inner-ear condition. On June 16, Toyota said he had been medically cleared to return to the track and is aiming at a competitive comeback in 2027.
Rovanperä announced the withdrawal on March 21, citing benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, an inner-ear disorder he was diagnosed with after symptoms began while he was driving. It had already forced him out of his first Super Formula test, at Suzuka, months earlier.
The gamble
The switch was a real gamble. After six seasons with Toyota in the WRC from 2020, and two world titles by the age of 23, he stepped away to chase circuit racing with Formula 1 as the distant target, leaving a discipline he had already won at the top to start near the bottom of another.
Leaving rallying was his own decision, announced late last year and built around a fresh challenge rather than a contract dispute. He was a champion with little left to prove on gravel, and the draw was a single-seater path that ends, if it works, at the top of the sport.
The plan had structure. He had signed to race Super Formula with Team KCMG and was set to step up to Formula 2 with Hitech, while contesting the Formula Regional Oceania Championship to begin banking the FIA superlicence points an F1 entry requires. He scored a podium at Teretonga Park before illness forced him out of the final round. A superlicence demands 40 points across three seasons, and a driver arriving at 25 has fewer years than most to collect them.
Super Formula is the top tier of Japanese single-seater racing, the quickest cars below Formula 1, and Toyota, the manufacturer behind Rovanperä's rally career, is one of its two engine suppliers. The move kept him inside the Toyota family while pointing at a new summit, with chairman Akio Toyoda personally championing it. A Super Formula seat is regarded as one of the harshest proving grounds in single-seaters, a place where a driver's speed is exposed quickly. For a driver chasing Formula 1 from outside the European feeder system, it was a credentialed if unusual route.
'My chapter isn't finished'
Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo brings brief, repeated bouts of vertigo when the head moves, most often diagnosed in older patients and frequently without a clear cause. It is generally treatable. For most people that is the end of it; for a driver whose head takes sustained cornering loads, clearance to compete safely sets a higher bar. Rovanperä had reportedly never shown symptoms before they appeared during his Suzuka test, which carried a medical ban that kept him out of the car.
Rovanperä framed the decision as a pause, not an ending. 'I have difficult news to share,' he wrote on March 21, confirming he would step back because 'my health doesn't allow me to continue safely at the moment.' He added that 'my chapter in circuit racing isn't finished,' and that fixing his health was now his first priority.
Toyoda, who races under the name Morizo and backed the switch, called the decision painful. He said Rovanperä's speed in private tests was 'clear to see' but that 'his body was struggling to keep up,' and that after a medical evaluation the team chose to pause his participation rather than press on.
The restart
That pause now has an end in sight. On June 16, Toyota said Rovanperä had been cleared to return to the track after working with KIHU, the Finnish Institute of High Performance Sport in Jyväskylä, the body best known for supporting the country's Olympic athletes. He has resumed physical training, with a phased return to driving to follow. The stated objective, in Toyota's words, is 'returning to competitive racing in 2027.'
What 2027 looks like is not yet fixed. Toyota said only that it and the driver are 'planning the next steps in his racing programme,' with further announcements to come; the reported options run from resuming the aborted Super Formula campaign in Japan to another route inside the Toyota structure. The superlicence clock that made the timing tight has not stopped, and the Formula 1 grid he is ultimately aiming at still has no vacant seats waiting. But the bet was always that a two-time rally champion's raw speed would carry across, and it is paused by a medical condition rather than by any question of pace.
When the championship he dominated reached Greece in late June, Rovanperä was absent from the entry list, the title race led by his former Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans. The detour he chose is still a detour, not a dead end. For the first time since the symptoms appeared, it has a target date: 2027.