While Hiroki Arai's GR Yaris Rally2 was winning Rally Hokkaido outright, a separate battle was running on the same Tokachi gravel: the XCR Sprint Cup, the cross-country class contested alongside the JRC round — and it produced a quietly satisfying weekend for Mitsubishi.

Two Tritons on the XC-2 podium

In the XC-2 class, the win went to a Toyota Hilux crew, but Mitsubishi-supported Tritons filled the next two steps. Cusco Racing's Hiroshi Yanagisawa and Naoki Kase took second, 15.2 seconds back after 115 km of competitive stages — their fourth consecutive podium this season, including one win. Third went to the Kei Rally Project Triton of Kei Takeoka and Masaki Yamada, the crew's first podium of the year. Takeoka's name will be familiar to Japanese readers as one of the country's best-known motoring journalists; her rally program has turned the Triton into a regular sight in the class.

They share their production-car roots with the Triton that won the Asia Cross-Country Rally outright last month, though the domestic XCR entries run to a different competition specification — campaigned at home on the same weekend Mitsubishi was showing a Ralliart-liveried Pajero next to the AXCR winner.

Mitsubishi's employee-run Outlander PHEV team is the XC-2S champion

The stranger and better story sits in the XC-2S class: an Outlander PHEV run by a volunteer team of Mitsubishi employees — Akiyuki Asai and Kazuki Furukawa — finished fourth, one round after the crew had already secured the 2026 class championship at the previous event.

A plug-in hybrid crossover winning a rally title with an employee crew reads like a marketing exercise, but the technical note in Asai's comments is the real content: he said the four-wheel control system responded precisely as surface conditions changed, with suspension tweaks on the final morning improving stability further — a glimpse of how Mitsubishi's production-based control technology, the same family of systems now fitted to the new Pajero, performs in competition.

Mitsubishi did not take the XC-2 class win, but two Tritons reached the podium while its employee-run Outlander PHEV completed another event as the newly crowned XC-2S champion — results across two very different machines, on the gravel that built the brand.