Oliver Solberg leads Rally Chile Bio Bío 2026 by 13.3 seconds with only the Wolf Power Stage remaining. The Swede, driving the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 alongside Elliott Edmondson, survived a nervous SS15 — running in Evans’ dust and nursing tyres after a puncture on the previous stage — to preserve his advantage over nine-time world champion Sébastien Ogier.

Ogier won SS15, the second pass through the 26.82km Carampangue test, by 5.4 seconds from Adrien Fourmaux. The Frenchman’s charge has been the defining feature of the weekend’s second half, and he now sits second overall with a realistic shot at the win if anything befalls Solberg on the final stage.

Behind them, Adrien Fourmaux has hauled the Hyundai i20 N Rally1 into third — a significant result for a team whose weekend was gutted by Thierry Neuville’s Saturday morning roll. Sami Pajari is fourth, and Evans, the championship leader, is now fifth and more than two minutes off the lead.

Full overall classification after SS15, the penultimate stage of Rally Chile Bio Bío 2026. The second column shows the gap to the leader; the third shows the gap to the car ahead.

Still to come: SS16, the Wolf Power Stage

One stage remains — SS16, BioBio 2, an 8.78km run that doubles as the Wolf Power Stage. It starts after 13:15 CLT, with the official finish and podium ceremony at Talcahuano from around 15:30 local time. It is the last of the rally’s 16 stages, which total 311.70 competitive kilometres.

At 8.78km this is one of the shortest Power Stages of the season, which compresses the margins and rewards an all-or-nothing run. Solberg needs only to bring the car home within 13.3 seconds of Ogier to take the rally win; the bonus points are a separate fight, and several drivers with nothing left to gain on the road will throw everything at it. Takamoto Katsuta, running under SuperRally after his Friday exit, was blunt about the prospects: “Of course we will try on the Power Stage. But there is a lot of loose so it is tricky to get any points.”

Elfyn Evans arrived in Chile leading the World Rally Championship and spent two and a half days driving exactly the race the situation demanded — controlled, clean, never quite fast enough to challenge Solberg but consistently good enough to hold second and limit the damage. On Saturday he clung to second place by three tenths of a second from Ogier. It was textbook championship management.

Then, on SS15, it fell apart. Evans picked up a puncture and was forced to stop and change a wheel mid-stage. He crossed the line with a time of 17:31.3 — more than two minutes adrift — and dropped from second to fifth overall, 48.5 seconds behind fourth-placed Pajari.

The compounding blow is the Super Sunday element. Evans had been leading the Super Sunday standings after SS14 — worth five bonus points — and the wheel change wiped that out entirely. He now scores nothing from Sunday’s accumulated classification, having been on course for maximum points from it an hour earlier.

Punctures were the theme of the day across the whole field. Fourmaux summed it up after his own run: “What a crazy rally to be fair. I’m surprised we had no punctures yesterday and today so many. It was such a beautiful stage and the most beautiful of the rally. There are so many different parts. I was enjoying it so much.” Solberg himself had picked up a puncture on the stage before SS15, and admitted he drove the Carampangue pass “quite scared” as a result.

Super Sunday awards championship points based on the fastest accumulated time across Sunday’s stages, on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale to the top five. It runs separately from the overall rally result and separately again from the Power Stage, which means a driver can score from Sunday even after losing the rally itself. The swing across SS15 was dramatic.

Super Sunday after SS14

Super Sunday after SS15

Evans falls out of the top five entirely. Ogier moves from third to first, gaining two points. Fourmaux jumps from fourth to second. And Katsuta — who lost his rally on the opening stage and rejoined under SuperRally — climbs into the points in fifth, a reminder that the Super Sunday format gives restarted crews something concrete to fight for.

SS15 was a 26.82km second pass through Carampangue, described from the helicopter feed as “a real work out for the crews — corner after corner after corner.” Here are the Rally1 stage times and what the drivers said at the stop line.

What the drivers said

Yohan Rossel leads WRC2 in the Lancia Ypsilon Rally2 HF, running eighth overall — an eye-catching result for Lancia’s return to international rallying. Robert Virves is second in the Škoda Fabia RS and closing, having taken 11.0 seconds out of Rossel on SS15 alone, with Gus Greensmith set to complete the class podium.

Rossel, characteristically blunt about his own run, said after SS15: “I am always honest. Sometimes it is bad for me. We need to continue and it is never easy. It was slippery in some parts — the grip is not bad, but not consistent.”

In the junior ranks, Leevi Lassila leads the Junior WRC entries in 18th overall, ahead of Ali Türkkan and Craig Rahill. Chilean crews feature strongly further down the order, with Felipe Padilla, Emilio Rosselot, Pedro Heller and Patricio Muñoz all classified on home roads — a reflection of how deeply this event has embedded itself in the region since arriving on the calendar.

Evans came to Chile leading the Drivers’ Championship with Sami Pajari his nearest challenger and Solberg third. On Sunday morning that lead looked safe — Evans was second on the road and topping Super Sunday. By the end of SS15 he was fifth overall, behind Pajari, with nothing from Sunday’s bonus pool.

The precise damage depends on the Power Stage, but the direction is clear: Evans loses ground to Pajari, who finishes ahead of him on the road; Solberg closes significantly if he converts the rally win; and Ogier, top of Super Sunday and second overall, takes a substantial haul from a weekend he entered without expectation.

The wider point is about attrition rather than arithmetic. Evans has spent this season winning the championship by not losing it — opening the road, managing tyres, banking seconds rather than chasing stage wins. That approach works until a rock finds a sidewall. With two rounds left on two of the roughest gravel surfaces the calendar offers, the strategy that built his lead is also the one most exposed by what just happened at Carampangue.

Next: Rally Italia Sardegna, 1–4 October

Round 13 takes the championship to Rally Italia Sardegna on 1–4 October 2026, based in Olbia. Sardinia’s rocky, rough gravel is among the most punishing surfaces on the calendar and produces exactly the kind of tyre attrition that just cost Evans in Chile. The season then closes with Rally Saudi Arabia in Jeddah on 11–14 November.