Takamoto Katsuta will be one of the permanent drivers to compete for Toyota in the World Rally Championship (WRC) in 2024, directly replacing Kalle Rovanperä – who will now share a third car with Sébastien Ogier. This kind of promotion, as expected, had already been decided, but comes after a strong performance in the Rally Japan.
In his home round, the driver won ten out of the 22 stages, and only an incident on Friday morning prevented him from achieving a higher position than fifth in the final classification. Quoted by the website dirtfish.com, Katsuta emphasized that his goal was victory and hopes that his performance has made it clear: ‘Before the Rally Japan, my goal was to go there and fight for the win. It is true that some people thought I was talking nonsense or something like that. But I was very serious and I hope the performance shows what I really wanted. But next year I need to come back with a good result, not like this year’.
The Toyota man also acknowledged that the Japanese round was good from a confidence standpoint: ‘Certainly, the level of confidence this weekend gave me a lot of confidence. But in SS2 I made a mistake and with things like that, your weekend can easily end. So I need to find the limit and what I need to pay a little more attention to. But I can be optimistic, I can attack more at this kind of level – it’s very, very important. But it’s obvious that Kalle [Rovanperä], Seb, Elfyn [Evans], I’ve seen them all and they are very, very good, very strong in this kind of thing. Therefore, this is the next step I really need to take’.
