While F1 Sleeps Catching Up With the WRC and WEC Title Fights

Formula 1 will not turn a wheel again until Zandvoort in three weeks, but the rest of the motorsport calendar has no interest in a summer break. Two championships in particular are worth keeping an eye on while the paddock is away. The World Rally Championship has just entered genuinely new territory, and the World Endurance Championship is in the middle of its most unpredictable season in years.

WRC: A Season That Has Never Looked Like This Before

For the first time in the championship's history, the entire second half of a WRC season will be run on gravel. That switch begins with Rally Estonia this week, followed by Finland at the start of August, and it changes the calculus for a title fight that was already tightening by the round.

Elfyn Evans leads with 201 points, and after five consecutive runner up finishes in the championship stretching back years, a first title finally looks within reach. Toyota teammate Sami Pajari sits second on 171, a remarkable position for a driver still chasing his maiden WRC win despite five podiums from seven starts this year alone.

The driver making the most noise, though, is Takamoto Katsuta. Two wins already this season, including an emotional first victory at Safari Rally Kenya back in March, have turned into the most consistent campaign of his career. A podium at a brutal Acropolis Rally Greece, achieved from a difficult road position, cut his deficit to Evans from 20 points down to just 11, and Katsuta has made no secret of the fact that the championship is now firmly on his radar.

Behind that trio, Oliver Solberg presents one of the more interesting cases in the field. He has won more stages than anyone else this year, but a string of costly errors has left him 49 points off his own teammate despite briefly leading the championship after the opening round in Monte Carlo. If he can cut out the mistakes over a gravel heavy run of rallies that suits his flat out style, he could yet be the biggest threat of all.

Hyundai's Adrien Fourmaux and Thierry Neuville sit sixth and seventh, each with a win to their name on gravel this year but neither quite able to match Toyota's overall pace. With Estonia and Finland both among Katsuta's favourite events on the calendar, the next month could go a long way to deciding where this title ends up.

WEC: Nobody Can Build a Lead

If the WRC has one driver pulling clear, the World Endurance Championship has gone the other way entirely. Four different cars have won the opening four rounds of the Hypercar class outright, a Toyota at Imola, a BMW at Spa, another Toyota at Le Mans and a second BMW win at Interlagos, and the LMGT3 class has produced four different winners of its own. Three separate crews have even shared the lead of the championship standings at various points, something that has only happened twice before in the series' history.

Much of the unpredictability traces back to Ferrari, the team that had dominated the class for three years running. A rule change forcing every manufacturer through a new wind tunnel for aerodynamic re-homologation caught the 499P out of compliance over the winter, and Ferrari has spent the season since trying to rediscover a balance that once looked untouchable. The result is a manufacturers' standings with Toyota out in front on 132 points, BMW breathing down its neck on 127, and Ferrari a distant third on 88, its longest winless run in years.

Cadillac, Alpine and Aston Martin make up a tightly packed midfield battle behind the top two manufacturers, while newcomer Genesis continues to build mileage and experience rather than chase results outright. The series heads to Circuit of the Americas for the Lone Star Le Mans in early September, the first of four rounds that will decide both the Hypercar and LMGT3 titles.

What's Next

Rally Estonia gets the WRC's gravel-only second half underway this week, with Finland to follow at the start of August. The WEC's next stop is Circuit of the Americas on 6 September. F1 itself returns at Zandvoort for the Dutch Grand Prix on 21 to 23 August, by which point both of these title fights could look rather different.