Who Is Petter Solberg?
Petter Solberg is the only driver to have won FIA world championships in two different motorsports. He took the World Rally Championship with Subaru in 2003, the first Norwegian to do so, then switched to rallycross and won the FIA World Rallycross Championship in 2014, its inaugural year, and again in 2015.
His rally career ran from 1998 to 2012. After a debut in a privately entered Toyota Celica and a season as Ford’s junior driver, he joined Subaru in 2000 and stayed nine years. He won 13 rallies, every one of them with Welsh co-driver Phil Mills, and finished runner-up in the championship in 2002, 2004 and 2005.
Rallycross was a second career, not a retirement. He spent 2013 learning the discipline in the European championship with his own team and finished eighth. A year later he was world champion, and in 2017 he built PSRX Volkswagen Sweden with Volkswagen Motorsport, a team that won the teams’ title in both of its two seasons.
He retired from full-time competition at the end of 2018 and signed off with a farewell tour the following year, taking a class win on his last WRC start at Wales Rally GB. His son Oliver now drives in the World Rally Championship; the two won the Race of Champions Nations Cup for Norway in 2022.
