Maxime Potty’s second Belgian Rally Championship title arrived earlier than anyone expected, including him.
Three years after becoming the youngest Belgian champion in history at 23, he is now a two‑time national champion at 26, sealing the 2026 crown with three rallies still to run in a season that was not even meant to be a full programme. The spreadsheets say the title was clinched when Boucles Chevrotines was cancelled; the story begins much earlier, in the first kilometres of the year and in the long shadow of a big crash on the European stage.
A title built, not snatched
The contrast with 2023 is stark. Then, Potty and co‑driver Renaud Herman only secured the championship after the Power Stage of the Spa Rally, in a finale charged with emotion and tension, where seconds decided everything. In 2026, the announcement feels almost bureaucratic: the Boucles Chevrotines disappears from the calendar, the maths clicks into place, and with Omloop van Vlaanderen, East Belgian and Spa Rally still to come, no one can catch the Skoda Fabia RS crew.
Potty is honest about the mixed feeling that brings. “It’s true that it feels a bit strange to win the title like this,” he says. “It’s always nicer to be crowned at the end of a duel on the stages, but that battle, we really did have it at the start of the season.”
That battle ran through West Flanders and beyond. At the TAC Rally in Tielt, his switch to the Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 marked a clear turning point. In a rally that Jos Verstappen had flagged as tricky—different asphalt types, changing grip, the need to “stay focused and avoid mistakes”—Potty dominated the opening loop, setting three quickest times in four stages and edging away from both Verstappen and Cédric Cherain. Those three drivers have divided the last three BRC titles between them; in Tielt, Potty set the tone for how 2026 would unfold.
“After our move to the Skoda Fabia RS at Tielt, we beat Jos Verstappen and Cédric Cherain on equal terms,” he explains. “We scored big points at every rally.” There is no single heroic stage in his retelling, no one “miracle win”—just a sequence of rallies where he kept the car pointing straight while rivals, at key moments, did not.
A season that wasn’t meant to be
What makes this second title more interesting is that it sits on top of a plan that was, by design, less than comprehensive.
The 2026 campaign was not conceived as a flat‑out, all‑in title defence. It began as a partial programme, shaped by opportunities and budgets rather than a fixed commitment to every round. There were other priorities in the mix: exploring the European Rally Championship, processing the consequences of an accident that left its mark not only on a chassis but on a career trajectory, and staying flexible enough to respond to whatever the year brought.
Against that backdrop, the way the points accumulated looks almost accidental. Strong results at TAC, other spring rounds, and then Ypres started out as targets in themselves and gradually added up to something more. By the time the crews rolled into Ypres, Potty and Herman were already in control of the classification.
Their run there crystallised the season. Early on, Potty sat third behind Stéphane Lefebvre and Hayden Paddon, a solid position in a rally that regularly reshapes the championship picture. By the finish, second place behind Lefebvre, while Verstappen and Cherain both saw rallies compromised by off‑road moments, turned the result into a pivot point. It wasn’t just a podium; it was the moment when his second title shifted from probable to almost inevitable.
“After Ypres, we knew that only Jos Verstappen could still deprive us of the title,” Potty says. “But he would have needed an almost perfect run in the last rallies. With Boucles Chevrotines cancelled, that was no longer possible, and in any case Jos wasn’t entered there.
Herman’s contribution runs through all of this. With this second crown, he is now a double Belgian champion among co‑drivers, the constant voice next to Potty through slick West Flemish lanes, long straights in Limburg and narrower tests in the East.
From ERC crash to national control
This calm, points‑driven picture in 2026 sits against an earlier moment when control slipped, brutally.
Potty’s move into the ERC came with the kind of big accident that tends to split careers into “before” and “after”. An attempt to push on unfamiliar roads, in a wider spotlight, turned suddenly into a high‑speed crash that not only destroyed a car but tested the underlying resolve. It’s the type of event that can nudge a driver out of the sport altogether, or push them into a different role.
His response was to return to Belgium and use the national championship as both a proving ground and a means to rebuild confidence. The first BRC title, in 2023, showed that the rebuild was serious; the second, in 2026, shows that the ceiling lies higher than that
It is no small thing to move from a difficult ERC moment to a position where, three years later, you can win your home title with three rounds to spare. The partial nature of the 2026 programme emphasises that point: this was not a season built on saturation, but on quality.
The duel that defined the early season
If there was a duel in 2026—and Potty insists there was—it played out less as a single showdown and more as a recurring theme: Maxime Potty vs Jos Verstappen vs Cédric Cherain, all of them in Rally2 cars at the sharp end of the Belgian field.
At TAC and other early rounds, Verstappen’s arrival in the Fabia RS—prepared by Sarrazin Motorsport, a car he described as more comfortable and better understood than his previous Citroën C3—added a new layer to the competition. Cherain, with his deep local experience, stayed close. Potty’s ability to beat both “à armes égales”, on the same machinery, mattered as much psychologically as it did on the points table.
Ypres amplified that pattern. Verstappen’s weekend there was complicated from the outset: a crash in Thursday qualifying damaged his Skoda enough that a replacement had to be prepared at the last minute, leaving him starting 33rd on the road and climbing through the order. On Saturday, another off‑road excursion put him out of the rally altogether. In championship terms, those were heavy blows—blows Potty avoided.
Potty’s Ypres, by contrast, read like a case study in what national champions often do: stay near the front, win when possible, and collect every point when rivals slip. The second place behind Lefebvre did not dominate the headlines in isolation, but when placed alongside Verstappen’s and Cherain’s misfortune, it became the pivot on which the season turned.
Renaud Herman, the quiet architect
While Maxime Potty’s name sits at the top of the results sheets, the voice in the right‑hand seat has been just as constant. Renaud Herman, Potty’s long‑time co‑driver, now joins him as a two‑time Belgian Rally Champion, having navigated both of his national titles and much of the journey between them.
Herman’s role in Potty’s rise was clear as early as 2023. In that season, the pair—then in a Citroën C3 Rally2 with PH Sport—won four of eight championship events, including Wallonie and Sezoens, and managed a controlled, error‑free finale at Spa to secure the title on Potty’s 24th birthday. The combination of a young driver and an equally young co‑driver turned heads: at the time, their team highlighted that Maxime (24) and Renaud (28) formed one of the youngest crews anywhere to win a major national rally championship.
Since then, Herman has become the fixed point in a programme that has experimented with different cars and different horizons. He was there through the Citroën phase, through the switch to the Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 in 2026, and through Potty’s exploratory forays into ERC and RGT machinery, including their evocative Alpine A110 RGT+ outings that previewed future GT rally battles. In each case, his job has been part metronome, part safety net: precise pacenotes on slick Belgian asphalt, calm decisions when grip changes mid‑loop, and the ability to help a driver reset after incidents like the Boucles Condruziennes crash that marked the early part of 2026.
Away from the stages, Herman balances rallying with a day job—Sales Manager at Metaltex’s Belgian office, which proudly celebrated his first title in 2023—but in the service park he is firmly seen as part of the “Potty project”: a co‑driver who has grown with his driver and helped turn a “partial” 2026 campaign into a second national crown. As Potty’s profile expands beyond Belgium, Herman’s steady presence in the right‑hand seat is one of the constants that make those ambitions feel sustainable, not just aspirational
A champion, twice over, looking ahead
With the title secured early, Potty’s tone now carries a hint of freedom.
“It’s a shame that the title is acquired so early in the season,” he says. “We’ll still be at the start of several rounds this autumn. We should be at the East Belgian Rally and the Spa Rally, but we haven’t finalised the rest of our programme yet. For now, we’re going to enjoy this title and have a great summer.”
That “great summer” sits on top of three very specific facts:
Maxime Potty is now a two‑time Belgian Rally Champion, having first taken the crown as the youngest champion in the country’s history and now defending it with room to spare.
He has rebuilt from a significant ERC crash into a position of national control, turning a partial BRC programme into a decisive title run.
He has beaten high‑profile rivals like Jos Verstappen and seasoned campaigners like Cédric Cherain in equal machinery, building a championship not on one grand gesture but on an accumulation of correct decisions.
In a championship that has become a magnet for international names and serious machinery, that combination of resilience and quiet dominance stands out. Potty’s 2026 title may not have the cinematic final‑stage drama of his first, but in some ways, that makes it more revealing.
It shows what happens when a driver who has already been tested badly decides to turn a “partial” season into something more substantial—and succeeds, with three rallies still waiting on the horizon.
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Sam Tickell. Racerviews.com
