The World Rally Championship published its 2026 schedule yesterday, with a disappointing, albeit unsurprising omission: a U.S. round was nowhere to be found. Fans were hoping to welcome the country’s first rally in nearly 40 years on the upcoming calendar, but despite four test and training functions of various sizes dating back to 2023, including a demonstration event and candidate rally, the WRC and its partners haven’t quite been able to get a Tennessee event over the line yet. Don’t take that to mean that organizers have given up, though, as the sport’s commercial body told The Drive that work is pressing on with a 2027 target.
“We have always had the objective for an important market like the USA that we have to ‘get it right the first time,'” a WRC Promoter spokesperson said in a statement. “With much work needing to be done to build the event from the ground up, we are being necessarily cautious towards the debut year.
“A planned Candidate Event in September will provide the best possible ‘proof of concept’ as well as a training opportunity for all of the U.S. rallying organisational community to learn about the standards of a modern WRC event, and this will provide an ideal evaluation platform. This is something we’re working on with the FIA, ACCUS and ARA hand-in-hand,” the statement continued.
The spokesperson added that more training events, beyond the September candidate rally, are planned at American Rally Championship events in the region throughout the second half of 2025.
The road to the first U.S. WRC round since the 1988 Olympus Rally in Washington has been a long one, but it was always going to be. Planning rallies is significantly more complicated than taking over a racetrack and involves multiple organizations acting in symmetry. The statement above names some of them—the FIA and its U.S. liaison, the ACCUS, plus the ARA, which obviously knows the legal and logistical hurdles of rallying in this country the best. But there’s also the local government, and representatives from the city of Chattanooga’s tourism board actually traveled to Finland as COVID restrictions were winding down to better understand how this symphony of motorsports and nature should work when it’s firing on all cylinders.
Speaking of Finland, the WRC happens to be there this weekend, and the subject of a U.S. rally was covered during a media roundtable. Emilia Abel, the road sport director of the FIA, said that all parties agreed that the event would benefit from another year of preparation, and emphasized the importance that the local organizers are following “exactly the same requirements as the FIA,” per Autosport.
That said, Abel was firm in predicting that 2027 would indeed be the year. “Yes, confident, 100%. We see some very good progress already over the last month. We see a dedicated team, so it’s certainly on a good path.” Abel added that there has been “no official application yet” for the September test, but it is nevertheless in planners’ sights.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
