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After the Finnish Rally Championship finale in Porvoo, Lappi will step away from professional rallying with two WRC wins, 15 podiums, 77 stage victories and titles at home, in Europe and in WRC2.
Photograph: Photographs supplied to ViPeopleEsapekka Lappi’s professional rally career is heading towards its last competitive weekend. He and Enni Mälkönen arrive in Porvoo for the Finnish Rally Championship finale as champions already, bringing a career that began on Finnish roads to a close on home soil. The result is settled. One more start remains.
At 35, Lappi leaves the World Rally Championship with 95 starts, two victories, 15 podiums and 77 stage wins. The numbers measure the reach of his career. Its shape lives in the patient climb through Finnish rallying, the breakthrough on home gravel, several factory chapters and a return to the national stages for a final title defence.
Lappi began competing in rally sprints in 2007 and made his WRC debut four years later. His first major breakthrough came in 2012, when he won all seven rounds of the Finnish Rally Championship. That season brought a national title and opened the way into Škoda’s factory programme.
Lappi first imagined a career in circuit racing before turning towards rallying at 20, according to Hyundai’s profile. The change led him into a discipline where judgement travels through two people, a set of pace notes and a road that can alter its grip from one corner to the next.
Lappi won the European Rally Championship in 2014, then claimed the WRC2 title in 2016. A drive with Toyota followed in 2017, taking him into the factory WRC field and back onto the fast gravel roads where his career had first gathered pace.
Lappi made the most of the Toyota opportunity immediately. At Secto Rally Finland in 2017, only the fourth rally of his Toyota programme, he took his first WRC victory on home ground. The Yaris WRC was quick, but the result also required a driver who could read a fast road at full commitment and keep the car inside the narrow margin between flight and mistake.
The victory carried weight for Toyota as well. The team had returned to the WRC that season, and Lappi’s win was its second since the comeback. His team-mate Juho Hänninen finished third, putting two Yaris WRCs on the podium at the rally that mattered most to the home crowd.
He finished fifth in the 2018 drivers’ championship, the strongest overall placing of his WRC career. Subsequent seasons took him through Citroën and M-Sport Ford, with selected Toyota appearances in 2021 and a fuller campaign in 2022. The teams changed. Lappi remained an unusually composed presence in a sport that often rewards its loudest characters.
Lappi joined Hyundai ahead of the 2023 season. His second WRC victory arrived at Rally Sweden in 2024, ending a wait of more than six years since Finland and giving Hyundai its first win of that campaign. On snow and ice, the Finn delivered the kind of measured speed that had marked his best work from the beginning.
Hyundai’s own description of Lappi points to a calm demeanour and a sharp sense of humour. Those qualities made him a distinctive presence in a service park where tension is part of the working day. The win in Sweden showed the competitive side of that calm: speed without theatre, and a result earned through the full length of a demanding winter rally.
For much of his top-level career, Janne Ferm was alongside him in the co-driver’s seat. When Ferm stepped away, Lappi formed a new partnership with Enni Mälkönen, the 2024 WRC2 co-drivers’ champion. Their work together would carry the closing chapter across both the world stage and Finland’s national championship.
Hyundai gave Lappi a five-round WRC programme in 2026. He finished sixth in Sweden and fourth at Safari Rally Kenya, placed eighth in Estonia and retired in Finland before returning for Chile. A sixth place in Chile became his final WRC result. In parallel, he and Mälkönen defended the Finnish title in a Škoda Fabia RS Rally2.
Their championship was secured with one round remaining after they won every stage at August’s Kitee Rally. It was a fitting final-season detail: Lappi had built his name by mastering the roads close to home, and his last campaign still found room for a national title earned through clean, complete work.
Lappi has said he wants his attention to turn towards family and life outside rallying after the Porvoo finale. The announcement closes his professional career, while leaving the future beyond that decision open. His record is already generous: titles in Finland, Europe and WRC2, two WRC victories, and a final championship chapter that brought him home to compete beside Mälkönen.
The last line will be written in Porvoo, among the roads and people that made the first chapters possible. For a driver whose greatest WRC victory came on home ground, that feels like a precise place to put the full stop.
