Sebastien Ogier returns to the FIA World Rally Championship grid at Rally Islas Canarias this week as the championship heads back to smooth Spanish tarmac, and the eight-time champion will find a reshaped fight waiting for him after Croatia's chaos. The rally runs from 23 to 26 April across 18 stages and 301.3 kilometres on Gran Canaria, the second of just three tarmac rounds left on the 2026 calendar.
Action kicks off Thursday with the 1.8 km Las Palmas head-to-head super special, a side-by-side format that divides rally purists but rewards casual viewers with an easy entry point. Friday features seven stages totalling two loops of Valleseco (13.00 km), Tejeda (18.62 km) and Mogan - at 21.7 km the longest of the day - plus a second pass of the super special. Saturday is two loops of Maspalomas, Arucas and Moya, the latter at 28.9 km the longest stage of the rally. Sunday's closing leg consists of two runs of Ingenio (25.93 km) and the Santa Lucia power stage, with no service break. Any morning issue on the final day will have no margin to recover.
The tarmac tyre war is set between the Toyota duo of Oliver Solberg and Elfyn Evans and a returning Ogier. Solberg and Evans were the fastest men in Croatia until both crashed out of the event, leaving the door open for Takamoto Katsuta, who has now won the last two rallies. Thierry Neuville came within a final-stage power stage error of adding Croatia to Hyundai's 2026 haul, with Sami Pajari flashing genuine tarmac pace and hinting at a breakout round.
Maximum Attack Rallying analyst Mal Rose expects Solberg and Evans to deliver, but warned of the wildcard element. "If you look at Solberg and Evans, they should have the pace, shouldn't they? They're both match sharp. They're both hungry. They're both really on it right now," he said, before tipping a podium of Solberg, Ogier and Evans. The prediction has Hyundai facing a tough weekend and Katsuta, Pajari and Neuville slipping off the top three now that the tarmac specialists are present.
Hyundai brings Dani Sordo back for his first outing of the season on what is technically his home rally. The Spaniard abandoned a recent Rally La Lana run before the final time control to avoid appearing on the results, a dry-run strategy common for the team's rotational third driver. He is there to collect points rather than fight for victory, a role he shares with Esapekka Lappi and Hayden Paddon across the programme.
At M-Sport, attention falls on Jon Armstrong, who again showed strong Croatia pace but damaged the car on a kerb. Three previous Canarias outings, including one in a Rally2 car, give him course knowledge. Teammate Josh McErlean is in survival mode after a miserable start to the year combining his own errors with mechanical issues.
WRC2 is a proper tarmac entry list. Yoann Rossel dominated Croatia with Nikolay Gryazin in Lancia Ypsilon Integrales - the pair winning 13 of 20 stages between them - and the class of the field looks set to repeat. Names including Roberto Dapra, Arthur Pellamourgues, Eric Camilli, Diego Dominguez, Jan Solans, Emil Lindholm and Alexey Lukyanuk round out one of the most stacked support-class grids of the season.
