BBC RADIO 1B
Katsuhiko Taguchi and Takahiro Yasui won the 2026 Asia Cross Country Rally in Thailand, turning a 2,145 kilometre route into a story about pace, navigation and mechanical sympathy.
Photograph: Manabu Takahashi / Asia Cross Country RallyCross-country rallying has its own measure of speed. The stopwatch still matters, though the route keeps asking a larger question. Can the crew move quickly through a changing landscape while preserving the car, reading the road and arriving at the next control with the same confidence it carried from the start?
Katsuhiko Taguchi and Takahiro Yasui answered that question most completely at the 2026 Musashi Asia Cross Country Rally. Team Mitsubishi Ralliart won the event from 9 to 15 August, giving the Japanese driver and co-driver pair the overall victory and Mitsubishi a second consecutive AXCR win.
The event covered 2,145.19 kilometres from Pattaya to Phitsanulok, including 921.80 kilometres of special stages. The route moved through Pattaya, Prachin Buri, Nakhon Sawan, Kamphaeng Phet and Phitsanulok. Rain, plantation roads, rocks, rivers and mud gave the crews a sequence of surfaces that refused to be solved with one setup or one driving style.
That is where cross-country rallying becomes a team sport in the fullest sense. The driver has to find traction and protect the tyres. The co-driver has to keep the navigation accurate when the road opens into several possibilities. The mechanics have to prepare for long hours in heat, dust and water, with every service stop carrying more responsibility than a short circuit pit lane.
Mitsubishi says Taguchi and Yasui finished with a total time of 12 hours 58 minutes 20 seconds and a winning margin of 2 minutes 25 seconds. The result came with three Triton T1 vehicles in the team, giving the programme a broad technical base across an event in which the smallest fault can grow into a major loss of time.
The winning margin is useful because it shows the shape of the performance. A cross-country rally rarely belongs to the crew that wins every single conversation. It belongs to the crew that keeps answering the route with fewer mistakes, fewer delays and a car that remains strong when the final stages arrive.
AXCR is built around a Southeast Asian landscape that changes the emotional temperature of the rally. A plantation road can look calm until the rain fills the ruts. A river crossing can become a mechanical question. Mud changes the line, visibility and the amount of work waiting for the service crew at the end of the day.
The event also connects motorsport to place. Pattaya provides the public opening, while the route carries the crews through provinces with their own roads, weather and communities. The finish in Phitsanulok gives the competition a clear destination, though the route between the two cities is where the story is earned.
Mitsubishi’s consecutive victories give the Triton T1 programme a useful foundation. A single win can come from a perfect week. Two in a row suggest that the team has learned how to prepare for the event’s specific mixture of speed, navigation and durability. The next step will be carrying that knowledge into an even broader regional rally raid conversation.
Taguchi and Yasui’s win also matters because it adds a Japanese driver and co-driver pairing to the event’s growing history. Their result places a human face on a large engineering programme. The stopwatch records the time, though the rally is remembered through the way a crew made decisions when the route stopped offering easy answers.
Thailand has become one of the most important rallying stages in Asia because it can hold competition, culture and a serious technical test in the same week. The 2026 AXCR has strengthened that position. It gave Mitsubishi another win, Taguchi and Yasui a defining result and the championship another long route to remember.
