Hyundai announced earlier on Friday that Lappi will contest selected WRC rounds next year in the team’s third Rally1 car. He will share driving duties in the third entry with Spain’s Dani Sordo and New Zealander Hayden Paddon.
Read more: Hyundai confirms 2026 WRC line-up as Lappi, Sordo and Paddon return
Lappi stepped away from the WRC last autumn and later stated that he was unlikely to be seen in the championship again. But now the driver from Pieksämäki is once more preparing to pull on factory overalls. His co-driver will be Enni Mälkönen, with whom he claimed the Finnish Rally Championship title this year in a Škoda.
Lappi will have plenty of driving next year: in addition to his part-time WRC programme, he will contest the full Finnish Championship season in a Škoda Rally2 car.
“I’m still quite surprised about the whole system, about how this was ultimately made possible. This is probably a pretty historic thing to happen – considering we already had an agreement to do the Finnish Championship with Škoda. Now Škoda Finland and Helkama-Auto are flexible, and Hyundai is flexible. And I’ll be driving two brands next year,” Lappi told RallyJournal.com.
“And it’s great for Enni as well. Now she gets to the level where she belongs,” Lappi added.
Lappi’s U-turn came after he received a phone call in early November from Hyundai’s team principal Cyril Abiteboul. The Frenchman managed to lure him back as Hyundai searched for a replacement for Ott Tänak, who left the WRC at the end of the 2025 season.
“In the call he started by saying he had read that I would be driving a Škoda next year. Then he asked whether I could add some rallies to my calendar with Hyundai’s Rally1 car. That’s how it started.”
“I thought it was a great approach. That one sentence already made it clear that what I had agreed earlier was still okay,” Lappi said.
“Is this a good thing or not”
Lappi did not make his decision instantly. He had to wrestle with the question, weighing valuable family time against the competitive instinct still burning inside him.
“I had already convinced myself that I would never again drive a top-class car. When that call came, I started wondering whether this was a good thing or not. It means that you can’t plan your own calendar – someone else will make the plan for you. But little by little the spark in the ignition plug started to light up, and it began to feel like a really good idea to do a part-time season,” Lappi recalled.
“We didn’t need to discuss that much with the family. My wife immediately started checking how many rallies it would be possible to do. When we put the Finnish Championship rallies and their tests alongside the WRC rounds and their tests, the number of travel days didn’t turn out to be that different from how much I’ve been away this year. Roughly speaking there will be maybe two more weeks, so it wasn’t a catastrophe at all.”
Lappi will start his WRC season in February at Rally Sweden. He did not yet reveal the rest of his programme, but it is highly likely he will contest at least the fast summer events in Estonia and Finland.
