Two wins from two rounds equates to only a share of the JWRC points lead thanks to the series' scoring system
Photography by M-Sport
Words by Alasdair Lindsay, Head of Content
Taylor Gill can’t stop winning rallies. He stood on the top step of the Rally Sweden podium and did the same in Portugal earlier this month.
You’d think he’d be on cloud nine. Part of him might be. Another part is possibly a tad frustrated.
“It’s the way it is,” said Gill at the finish of Portugal, having clinched a second consecutive win.
It, in this case, is the Junior World Rally Championship’s points system. Two wins from two sounds dominant. But the series’ bonus points – one point per stage win – has for many years provided a hugely consequential twist to championship strategy.
Mille Johansson has finished second twice, having had incidents at both rallies. But he’s also won 25 out of 40 stages so far this season – the equivalent points haul of a rally win.
It’s creating a fascinating title battle where two (unintentionally) divergent approaches have led to the same outcome: 59 points on the board.
“We’ve proved that we can be consistent and stay out of trouble,” said Gill. “Mille’s proved that he can win stages, so…”
Gill has headed Johansson on the podium at both 2025 JWRC rounds to date
He pauses for a second.
“At the end of the day it is what it is. We know the point system and we’re managing, so that’s the way it is.”
It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable for Gill to feel hard done by. No other championship in the WRC’s three tiers has bonus points for stage wins (outside of overall bonus points for the powerstage, hoovered up by the Rally1 runners). In any other circumstance he’d have a 16-point lead.
But Johansson has shown that raw speed, even when combined with errors, might be enough to win titles. Last year’s Junior champion Romet Jürgenson still led the title race heading into the season finale despite double DNFs in Italy and Finland, thanks in part to his stage win bonuses.
It’s not as if racing to make up for lost time is Johansson’s strategy though. A crash on his home rally at the start of the year was followed by a rapid climb back up the leaderboard; it was a similar story in Portugal when he caught a rut and rolled his Ford Fiesta Rally3 over.
Fafe's famous jumps weren't the only times that Johansson's wheels left the ground in Portugal
It was a poorly timed mistake, coming on a day with 10 stages and only remote services. Without rear brakes even after his broken suspension was fixed, he lost almost a minute.
His season so far has been messy – but fast. And the points structure has rewarded that speed.
“It’s good when you have the stage win points, but for sure it’s two rallies in a row where I made mistakes,” said Johansson.
“[It was] not our weekend but we finished the rally 13 seconds off the pace, so we have caught a lot of time and also shown good pace. So it’s been a good rally but also bad in another way.”
Johansson is enjoying an expansive season of learning, dovetailing his Junior WRC campaign with outings in the European and Italian Gravel championships in a mixture of RS and evo-spec Škoda Fabia Rally2s.
Australian is reliant on backing from FIA Rally Star talent development program
Gill isn’t so fortunate. Having to leave a bit of margin but finding success has been a theme of his career to date. Triumphing in the Oceanian leg of the FIA Rally Star’s talent identification program in 2022, he had to win his chance to be here and has averaged only one rally outside of his Rally Star-backed events in the past three years.
He scraped together the cash to compete on Rali Terras d’Aboboreira as preparation for his Portugal JWRC outing. It ended with a roll – extraordinarily, the first of his entire career.
“It was a wake-up call, to be honest,” said Gill of his practice-event shunt. “It just showed that all it takes is the tiniest mistake; a couple inches too tight to a corner and it’s all over.
“It was a wake-up call, but it meant that we stayed out of trouble this weekend, so I’d rather have done the crashing last weekend.
“We couldn’t have had the speed we had this weekend if we didn’t crash last weekend, as weird as it sounds to say. After it happened the other week, it was like a weight off the shoulders and that’s it. We’ve got our little accident out of the way, we’ll go to Portugal and push like hell. You’ve got your war wound to show for it.”
A scare on his Portugal practice rally focused Gill's mind on the prize
The irony, of course, is that Johansson made that exact mistake, yet finished the rally with only two fewer points, having won 13 stages to Gill’s seven.
The upside for Gill is that the next two rounds might put a stronger onus on his approach delivering larger dividends, and compromise Johansson’s ability to match his scoring even after making mistakes.
Greece is next; famously a race of attrition for the smaller Rally3 machines which lack the robustness of their bigger, faster cousins on the rough Acropolis stages. As Gill points out, Greece “is totally a lottery”. Better news still is that Finland is his ‘home’ round of the season – he lives and works a couple of hours south of Jyväskylä and took his first Junior WRC win there last year.
But Johansson is talking a big game. It would be easy to suggest he’s pushing too hard and risking the consequences, trying to win the title on raw pace alone and ignoring the long game. He says that’s not the case.
Johansson defends his approach that has yielded trophies and - more importantly - points
“No, I’m not really pushing absolute max,” said Johansson. “It’s always some percent that I have left. So I always try to drive fast and with a good flow.
“The times come when I drive well but I feel like I’m never pushing – but if I wanted to push more, I don’t know if I could do it. But that’s the feeling I have.”
It’s setting up a fascinating two-way title battle. And, you never know: with the importance of bonus points, those who’ve fallen behind early in the title race like Diego Domínguez Jr, Ali Türkkan and Kerem Kazaz could still have time to catch up.
For Gill, winning may not be enough. But equally, speed alone hasn’t clinched the deal for Johansson. The question is: who’ll be able to unlock both sides of the equation first?
Words:Alasdair Lindsay
Tags: JWRC, JWRC 2025, Mille Johansson, Taylor Gill, WRC
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