James O’Malley will head to this weekend’s 2026 Southwest Excavations Rally of Oberon with his sight firmly set on finishing the season as NSW 2WD Rally Champions.

The O’Malley Rally team have enjoyed a strong 2026 campaign aboard their Toyota 86, and head into the final Rally NSW event of the season leading the NSW 2WD Rally Championship.  With regular co-driver Jono Forrest unavailable this weekend, O’malley will see James Ford sitting in the co-drivers seat.

O’Malley currently sits on 101 points, ahead of Robert Gorst on 86 and Tony Sullens on 74, putting him in a strong position heading into the Oberon finale.

It has not all been straightforward for the team, however.

Their season took a major hit at the Narooma Forest Rally when an electrical problem with the Toyota ended their hopes of scoring points. Outside of that disappointment, O’Malley has been remarkably consistent.

He scored strongly at the Rally of Bathurst, Rally of the Bay and Ada River Rally, and his results have also placed him an impressive fifth outright in the NSW Rally Championship heading into the final round.

With the Championship allowing competitors to drop their two lowest scores, the Narooma disappointment has had less impact on O’Malley’s title campaign than it might otherwise have. Now the job is to bring it home.

“It’s been a really good year for us apart from Narooma, which was obviously a frustrating weekend,” O’Malley said.

“The Toyota has been really competitive and when we’ve finished events, we’ve generally come away with good points. We’ve put ourselves in a great position going into the last rally, so now we just need to concentrate on doing our job.”

The absence of fellow 2WD contender Tony Sullens from the Oberon field further strengthens O’Malley’s position, although there will be no shortage of competition on the classic forest roads through the Jenolan area.

O’Malley says the focus will be firmly on getting through the event cleanly rather than becoming distracted by championship calculations.

“You can’t go into a rally thinking too much about points because that’s when mistakes happen,” he said.

“We want to enjoy the roads, keep the car underneath us and get to the finish. If we can do that and come away with the 2WD Championship, it would be a pretty special way to finish the season.”

The Southwest Excavations Rally of Oberon will bring the 2026 Rally NSW season to a close on Saturday, 14 November, with approximately 125 kilometres of competitive stages and a traditional roadbook-only format.

For O’Malley and Forrest, it represents one final challenge after a season that has demonstrated just how competitive the Toyota 86 can be against the state’s leading rally crews.

And after the disappointment of Narooma, a championship victory at Oberon would be a fitting way to finish the job.