🇪🇪 Robert Virves

The first Estonian to win the WRC2 title, and the first Škoda driver to do it since Andreas Mikkelsen in 2023. Born in 2000, Virves came to the world championship in 2020 on his home event and spent his junior years making the kind of statement that gets a career funded.

The clearest of those came at Rally Estonia in 2022, where he won seventeen stages in the Junior WRC class on a single event — one more than Sébastien Ogier managed on the 2008 Jordan Rally, and a record in the category. He sealed the Junior title that year at the Acropolis Rally, collecting as his prize six rallies in an M-Sport-supported Ford Fiesta Rally2, which is how the step up to Rally2 machinery was paid for.

His WRC2 championship was built on four consecutive event wins with co-driver Jakko Viilo in the Toksport WRT Fabia, and then settled in an unusually quiet way: the loss of the season's final round left his nearest challenger unable to close the gap, so the title was confirmed while he was not competing. He was phlegmatic about it, observing that he does not write the rules and sometimes it works out like that.