The World Rally Championship will run a round in the United States from Aug. 26 to 29, 2027, with Knoxville, Tennessee as its base and gravel stages in the Southern Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky. It will be the series’ first American event since 1988, when the Olympus Rally in Washington state last counted toward the championship.
The American round is one of the additions to a 2027 calendar that grows from 13 events this year to 15. The announcement came on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, after approval by the FIA World Motor Sport Council, and it also returns Saudi Arabia as the season finale and brings Rome and Aberdeen onto the schedule, according to Reuters and Racer.
The American round on the 2027 schedule
Racer’s report on the announcement, headlined as WRC confirming a return to the United States for 2027, puts the event at Aug. 26 to 29, expected to be based in Knoxville, with route and format details still to come, and places it in late summer, roughly a month after the Finnish round that follows Estonia. Autosport adds that it will be a gravel rally in “close to the format” fans already know, with a shakedown on Thursday, and that the road network spans Tennessee and Kentucky.
The American round was confirmed after a candidate event in June 2026 tested the stages, the same stages Reuters says will be used for the championship round. Autosport reports the debut was delayed from 2026 to 2027 to give the event the best chance of success, and that the WRC Promoter worked on it with ACCUS, the United States’ FIA national sporting authority.
The 1988 Olympus Rally
Reuters, in a report carried by The Star, identifies the previous U.S. round as the Olympus Rally in Washington state, which sat on the world championship calendar from 1986 to 1988. That makes the 2027 round a return after 39 years rather than the continuation of a recent run, and it puts the American stage of the sport in the Appalachian foothills of the East instead of the Pacific Northwest forests that hosted the Olympus event.
Racer, Autosport and Reuters all use the same 1988 benchmark in their reports on the announcement, and none of them describes a later U.S. round counting toward the series. The dates and the 15-round total are consistent across all three, each of which quotes federation and promoter officials directly.
Fifteen rounds, a longer season
The new calendar opens with the Rallye Monte-Carlo from Jan. 21 to 24, the season opener, and closes in Saudi Arabia from Nov. 25 to 28. In between, Rally d’Italia moves from Sardinia to Rome and the surrounding Lazio region on asphalt, July 8 to 11, and Rally Scotland, based in Aberdeen, runs Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, the first British round since 2019.
Autosport’s calendar report says 15 events is the largest field since 2008, and that Estonia (July 22 to 25) and Finland (July 29 to Aug. 1) are scheduled on consecutive weekends, which compresses the high summer of the season into a run of back-to-back gravel events before the American round in late August.
Federation and promoter statements
FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem called the United States “one of the most important growth opportunities for the FIA World Rally Championship,” according to Reuters. In the Racer account he added that it offers “an exciting opportunity to grow in a country where interest in rallying continues to rise.”
WRC Promoter chief executive Éric Boullier told Reuters the calendar creates tremendous opportunities for the series’ manufacturers, commercial partners and fans. Racer quotes him describing 2027 as the beginning of “an exciting new chapter,” and quotes chief operating officer Julien Vial saying the aim is a championship that combines the unique sporting challenges of rallying, a vision he set out in the announcement.
Autosport names a second federation voice, Malcolm Wilson, the FIA deputy president for sport, as commenting on the American return alongside Vial. Its explainer on the U.S. round says the candidate event in June went well enough to secure the date.
The sport has a thin recent record in North America, which is why the date carries weight beyond the calendar count: the Olympus Rally’s three years from 1986 to 1988 are the only American rounds in the coverage reviewed here, and the new event ends a gap of almost four decades between American rounds. Reuters says the stages used in Tennessee and Kentucky will be those tested at the June candidate event, which means organizers have already run competitors over much of the intended terrain.
The route itself is still unpublished. Stage lengths, the service park location and the Kentucky portion of the route are not in the published material, and the initial Carscoops report carries the same dates without further detail.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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