Ogier claimed a historic ninth world title despite skipping three rounds. At the same time, he drew level with his compatriot Sébastien Loeb in the number of championships. While Loeb collected his titles consecutively in Citroën machinery, Ogier’s world championship trophies have come with three different manufacturers.
Ogier secured his first titles in dominant fashion with Volkswagen, which ruled the World Rally Championship between 2013 and 2016. When VW withdrew from the series due to the emissions scandal, Ogier had to look for a new employer. The next two championships came with M-Sport Ford, but things no longer worked out with Citroën in 2019, when Ott Tänak was crowned champion with Toyota.
After his turbulent Citroën season, Ogier replaced Tänak at Toyota following the Estonian’s move to Hyundai and added two more titles to his tally. After that, Ogier stepped back into a part-time role, yet still managed to grind out one more world championship trophy.
“I had some great seasons already in my career, and I feel very thankful for that. I’ve been working with fantastic teams many times, and obviously the Volkswagen era was very, very successful. There was some super strong season there definitely but this one is right on the top two and maybe the best still, in terms of I don’t know, I think the maturity,” Ogier explained at the end of the rally year.
“I have a rich experience after all those year and I really maximised basically almost every opportunity this year. There was this little setback in Central Europe, but again, not much, which I could make differently, basically it was more bad luck than anything else. This tone has just been, yeah, I don’t even have the words to describe this season.”
Although Ogier was undeniably the fastest driver of the 2025 season, the championship fight stretched all the way to the final round in Saudi Arabia. With the current points format, skipping three rallies means handing over a very large points haul to the other drivers.
“I mentioned before that all the stars have to be aligned if I really want to succeed, because when you compete a couple of rally less it’s never easy, especially these days with the Super Sunday points there with many points to catch every weekend,” Ogier said.
“So when you miss three races, it’s many opportunities to lose points and at the same time Elfyn (Evans) and Scott (Martin) have been mega consistent the whole year. So that’s why the season was decided on the last stage of the last rally which somehow is good for the show for sure, and also good for the emotion that we get,” Ogier sums up.
Ogier will once again be on the start line when the new rally season begins in a few weeks’ time with the Monte Carlo Rally on his home roads. The French ace has once again announced that he will contest a selected programme of WRC events, but it remains to be seen whether the plan will change in the event of success, as it did last year.
The Monte Carlo Rally will be held in the French Alps from 21 to 25 January.
