Jonne Halttunen appears on SPIN, The Rally Pod and says he's concerned for the WRC that one team is so far ahead
Now is a good time to wear the ‘GR’ logo on your uniform in the World Rally Championship.
Toyota has won all four rounds of the season so far in 2026, leads the manufacturers’ championship by nearly 100 points already and its four full-time drivers are the top four drivers in the world championship. Even part-timer Sébastien Ogier is just one point shy of Hyundai’s leading driver, Adrien Fourmaux.
Jonne Halttunen may not be inside one of the competing cars anymore, but through his work as project manager of the brand’s American Rally Association project, he still wears a ‘GR’-branded T shirt. He remains a Toyota man.
But the two-time world champion doesn’t take Toyota’s domination as a source of satisfaction. Far from it, as he explained on DirtFish’s podcast SPIN, The Rally Pod.
“In WRC I’m generally worried, like if you are the top three in Toyota, you can be on the podium,” Halttunen said. “It’s not healthy for the the long-term, but luckily ’27 is coming with the new regulations. So I think that will change.
“I’m more a bit worried about what Hyundai is doing – not as a Toyota guy, as a rally guy,” he added. “If you look at their speed last year and this year, they were slower compared to the top guys [in Canarias]. That’s worrying that you cannot do any progress during the year or actually the opposite.”
Halttunen doesn’t have a great deal of experience of working inside a struggling team. Even before he and Kalle Rovanperä joined Toyota, their Škoda team was the benchmark in WRC2.
Since Halttunen competed for Toyota in 2020, it’s only missed out on two world titles (2020 manufacturers’ and 2024 drivers’) to Hyundai.
“In that sense it’s a hard to say [what it’s like, but] I see from the faces of the drivers, like the mentality of the other guys who are not in Toyota,” the Finn observed.
“OK, M-Sport is positive in a way because for me they have been doing fairly well. Especially Jon [Armstrong] who has been for me the star of the season. OK, there has been a lot of small mistakes but he’s still learning and trying to show that he belongs to the top tier. Which he actually does if you ask from me because with that level of experience what he has, he’s doing a mega job at the moment.
“That’s good, so for me they’re actually not in that bad condition. They have been in a worse situation before. But if I go into the mindset of, let’s say, [Adrien] Fourmaux and Thierry [Neuville], you can see already they’re not so happy only coming to the event.
“For sure, that will show also if you see their comments from their management, they are not like very positive ones. I just can feel that it’s not so nice inside the team.
“And if we think the sport as a whole, it would be a bit nicer situation if everybody would be happy at least once in a while. Not everybody can win, it would be about the fight. And that’s also for the fans.”
You can listen to the full interview with Halttunen now, where he talks about his work in the US, his new TV project and the surgery he’s recently had after a problem he picked up in Paraguay last year.
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Tags: Jonne Halttunen, SPIN The Rally Pod, WRC, WRC 2026
Publish Date April 29, 2026 DirtFish
https://dirtfish-editorial.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/2026/04/slZaS274-HALTTUNEN12CER25tb201-780x520.jpg April 29, 2026
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