Based in the Bavarian city of Passau, the rally serves up a mix of roads unlike anything else on the calendar. One moment it’s wide and flowing through the Czech hills; the next, it’s tight, technical and slippery through the forests of Lower Bavaria.
Throw in autumn weather that can change by the hour and you’ve got a rally where conditions are never constant – and confidence is everything.
No two days – or even stages – are the same at Central European Rally. Crews must master an ever-changing mix of surfaces, widths, camber and grip levels as they move between countries and regions. Some sections resemble traditional German asphalt, others are more like rural Czech hillclimbs – bumpy, blind and deceptively fast.
Sébastien Ogier is on for a 100% podium record in 2025 after completing eight rounds of the championship so far, but we’ve seen far more of him on gravel than Tarmac.
Can Ogier keep up the same momentum in Central Europe – a rally he’s never finished on the podium at before?
Ogier has hogged the limelight (and rightly so) after moving into the championship lead, but Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans is just two points behind! This thing is far from done yet.
Evans has failed to finish higher, or outscore, Ogier on any of the events they’ve both started in 2025 though, so he needs a big response in CER to apply the pressure onto the ominous Ogier.
Now that the cat is out of the bag so to speak with Kalle Rovanperä’s rallying exit and circuit racing switch for 2026 public knowledge, will he drive with total freedom with effectively nothing to lose but everything to gain in rounding out his WRC spell with a third world title?
Well, he’s currently 21 points adrift of team-mate Ogier so does have some catching up to do, and does head to Central Europe with a handicap.
Historically, CER is Hyundai’s playground. On the two previous visits, Toyota is yet to win. But lest we forget how badly the last Tarmac event, Rally Islas Canarias, went for the i20s.
CER is of course a different style of Tarmac running in a very different season, but attention will be on whether Hyundai can match Toyota for pace this week. And of course whether Ott Tänak will prove faster than his team-mates running a different specification of car.
Having been delisted from manufacturers’ points responsibility, Tänak will not only take a fresh engine this week but he’s also using the Monte Carlo-spec Hyundai, with Thierry Neuville and Adrien Fourmaux driving the car driven in Canarias.
Chile was not Munster’s peak result this season, but it was probably his most complete performance. There wasn’t a lot left on the shelf for the Luxembourger to grab.
The significance is he’d done the rally twice before in a Rally1 car – and the same is true of this week’s Central European Rally.
In fact statistically this is Munster’s strongest rally, with a seventh and fifth place finish in 2023 and ’24. Expecting that to go up by another increment of two (to third) in 2025 might be a touch ambitious, but it’s certainly fair to expect another strong weekend where Munster outperforms M-Sport team-mate Josh McErlean.
