Takamoto Katsuta finally broke through this year, and World Rally Championship convention said the hard part was over. Win once, the theory goes, and the second comes more easily. Instead the opposite has happened — and Toyota's technical director thinks he knows why.
Katsuta claimed a long-awaited and hugely popular maiden WRC victory at the Safari Rally Kenya, then backed it up immediately at the next round in Croatia, albeit after Thierry Neuville crashed out of a commanding lead on the final stage. The Japanese driver spoke of feeling "lighter" once he had proved to himself he could win at the top level. Since then, though, he has not returned to the podium and has been outpaced by all four of his team-mates.
Rally Japan, his home event, was the lowest point. Katsuta ran wide on the opening stage and dropped a wheel into a drainage ditch, picking up a puncture that cost him a soft tyre he badly needed for a later damp test. He recovered to fourth across the final two days, but the damage — to the result and the mood — was done.
Toyota technical director Tom Fowler, writing in his column for Club DirtFish, suspects the breakthrough itself is part of the problem. Once a driver finally wins, anything less starts to grate.
"What I've noticed over the years is that winning... well maybe it's not actually that good," Fowler wrote. "When you win, you're happy for like maybe 10 minutes or a day. But when you lose, you're so [ticked] off for like two weeks — one of the main reasons to win is to not be [ticked] off for two weeks!"
He continued: "Then you have to do it again, and all the work starts again. And perhaps this, along with increased expectation... you think that you're going to come to a road where everything starts to feel easy, but actually it just gets more difficult. And that's probably where Taka's been in the last few weeks. But I don't think it's a problem. I think it's normal in his situation."
The timing of the slump matters, because the championship is about to pivot onto terrain where Toyota expects to be strong. The entire second half of the season is staged on gravel, opening with the brutal, high-heat Acropolis Rally Greece later this month — exactly the kind of run on which a settled, confident Katsuta would be expected to deliver.
The gravel swing also offers opportunity further down the order. M-Sport's Jon Armstrong, promoted to the Ford squad's Rally1 line-up this year after three seasons in the European Rally Championship, is targeting the top five and, on his day, a podium.
"If we can be more consistent and then up the pace as we go along then that will be a good goal," Armstrong told DirtFish. "I think if we have some clean rallies, maybe a couple of top-five finishes could be quite a good thing for the season. OK, the podium is going to be tricky but we never know what can happen."
He has history with several of the upcoming gravel rounds and sees the demanding Acropolis as a chance rather than a threat. "I think Acropolis can be quite good for us if we have a similar approach to Japan and just try to stay out of trouble because that's a rally where it could really pay off," he said.
One unknown hangs over the whole run-in: tyres. Hankook has been racing to deliver a revised hard-compound gravel cover after durability complaints at Rally Portugal, with the new specification tested in Greece this week ahead of a string of hot gravel events. Hankook's Steven Cho acknowledged the rescheduled June date had raised the stakes.
"This year we're probably expecting it to be more difficult than last year, so we want to make sure the tyres have the durability we want," Cho said. "They have to be able to get to the end of the stage with the right amount of tyre wear."
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/katsuta-post-win-slump-tests-toyota-before-wrcs-gravel-swing). Visit for full coverage.*
