Josh Redhead has confirmed he will return to the EROAD Australian Rally Championship (ARC) this year with the hopes of doing up to four events for the season.
Behind the wheel of the Hyundai i20 G4, Redhead and co-driver Ray Winwood-Smith will be targeting silverware in the incoming East Coast Cup and WOLF Cup honours.
While their 2026 schedule is yet to be finalised, the pair are locked in to contest the season-opening Rally Queensland in April and the ARC’s newest event, the New South Wales based Narooma Forest Rally in June.
The remainder of Redhead’s schedule is still up in the air, with visits to Tasmania and South Australia a possibility to keep him in the hunt for the WOLF Cup, while the season-ending Gippsland Rally would round out his East Coast Cup campaign.
In addition to their ARC crusade, the pair will also do some state rounds in their Hyundai G4 and an old Datsun Stanza, which they recently acquired after selling their popular Mitsubishi EVO.
“The idea at the moment is to do both the East Coast Cup and the WOLF Cup in the G4 and compete in some select events in the Stanza, which is our EVO 3 replacement,” Redhead said.
“We will start the year off by doing our local round in Bathurst and the Ada Rally before running in Queensland for the ARC. From that point, we will go on an event-by-event basis, and it will most likely be in the G4, but it’s currently undergoing a complete rebuild with a new engine, driveline and a rewire.
“We are also a strong chance of doing Narooma as well. We have been fortunate enough to have had two great successful results there over the last two yrs and a bit of experience there certainly goes a long way, so I am confident that we could get a good result.
“With that said, we are still very realistic when it comes to our expectations for the ARC and we are still very realistic in knowing the capabilities of what a G4 can do compared to the newer Rally2 cars.
“So all in all, I think we can be a serious contender for the WOLF Cup and scratching the back end of the top 6 with the big boys.”
Should Redhead contest all four rallies, it will be his largest showing at national level in his career, with his most recent run being at this year’s Toyota Gazoo Racing Rally of Canberra.
In 2024, Redhead and Winwood-Smith contested the Buckby Motors Rally Tasmania and Rally of Canberra – the latter of which he finished 10th outright – while making his ARC debut in 2022 in Canberra.
Although he is still in the early phases of his ARC career, Redhead is a proven performer at state level, having won three events in the past three years along with a further eight podiums.
The 2026 EROAD Australian Rally Championship begins with Rally Queensland in Gympie on 17–19 April.
