Takamoto Katsuta arrived at Rally Islas Canarias as the unlikely leader of the FIA World Rally Championship, carrying a points cushion built on consistency, second places and the brutal efficiency of Toyota's Yaris GR Rally1. For the Japanese driver to extend that lead on Gran Canaria's sinuous asphalt stages, he has turned to the man who dominated this event twelve months ago — and who is not in the service park to compete against him.
Kalle Rovanperä won fifteen of this event's eighteen stages in 2025, the most statistically crushing performance seen anywhere in the WRC last season, eventually taking victory by almost a minute. With the two-time world champion sitting out the 2026 Canaries on his partial programme, he has quietly slipped into the role of mentor-in-absence for his team-mate, even as Katsuta took a 0.4-second win over Toyota stablemate Sami Pajari in the opening super special in the Gran Canaria Stadium on Thursday night.
"I spoke a lot with Kalle last night and now he was looking also at my shakedown," Katsuta said. "I think he did an amazing job last year with tyre management and pushing and being committed. You need to have a kind of clear idea what is the right thing to do with the tyre."
The detail of that long-distance knowledge transfer reveals just how serious Toyota is about protecting Katsuta's points lead. Rovanperä has been studying the current standings leader's onboards and comparing them, corner by corner, to his own winning runs from a year ago.
"He asked me to send my onboards," Katsuta explained. "He is just checking basically and, for example, looks at comparisons of last year's stages with him."
"Kalle obviously handled this really, really well last year, so I'm trying to find this kind of feeling," he added.
Canaries tarmac is, counter-intuitively for a supposed rally purist, a discipline closer to circuit racing than anything else on the calendar. The smooth, grippy surfaces reward commitment into high-speed corners and punish anyone who overdrives and cooks the rubber. Katsuta, eighth fastest across the Thursday shakedown behind Oliver Solberg, is acutely aware of that trade-off.
"It's basically the same as circuit racing — when you're really trying to push sometimes it makes it worse," he said. "It's small details but the small details will help for sure in this kind of rally."
Rovanperä's benchmark from 2025 is also the envy of his rivals, not just his team-mate. Sébastien Ogier, the nine-time world champion who returns to Canaries in the second Toyota, admitted that everyone in the service park had been studying how the young Finn had put the rally out of reach last year.
"All of us have been checking a little bit what he was doing differently," Ogier said. "He clearly had more confidence in the high speed corners and more committed. Every corner above 120 kph he was just more committed than all of us. It was pretty impressive, the performance he delivered last year."
Solberg, who edged Katsuta in Thursday's shakedown and starts as one of the pre-event favourites, drew a similar conclusion.
"He drove very nicely, cleanly last year, took care of the tyres well, but also very big commitment," Solberg said.
For Katsuta, 33 this year and still chasing a maiden WRC rally win, Canaries now represents something more than a 20-stage asphalt workout. A third straight top result, following his inherited Croatia victory last round after Thierry Neuville's final-stage heartbreak, would underline that his championship lead is no statistical quirk. He has already beaten Pajari in the super special. The real test, as he knows, begins when the Friday proper stages start climbing into the Gran Canaria mountains.
Rovanperä's notes, on the phone at night and in those onboard comparisons, will either prove just how far the apprentice has come — or just how difficult it still is to follow the master's blueprint.
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