Mitsubishi president Keisuke Kishiura, who took the job in April 2026, has given Best Car Web an interview covering the revived Pajero and where the company wants to take it in competition. He set out three different levels of commitment — and the differences between them are the story.
AXCR next year: an intention, not a program
Mitsubishi competed in this year's Asia Cross Country Rally and took a second straight win there. Next year, Kishiura said, he wants to enter the new Pajero in AXCR, and ultimately to be ready to fight at Dakar. That was a statement of intent rather than a program announcement: no entry, budget or date has been declared.
Dakar: the car already exists
On Dakar, Kishiura's framing was that the base vehicle is already there — meaning the new Pajero itself is a plausible foundation for a cross-country rally car. He describes Dakar as the eventual destination of the AXCR work rather than a near-term entry.
WRC: no formal study, and a missing base car
This is where Kishiura was most specific, and most negative. On a World Rally Championship return he said Mitsubishi has not yet reached the point of a formal internal study of what the base vehicle would be, though he believes some people in the engineering ranks think about it with some ambition. The technology and the know-how, he said, are there in sufficient measure. The obstacle is the car: because a WRC entry is not a purpose-built one-off, the company would need a model that also works as a volume production car underneath it.
That is a meaningful thing to have on the record. Mitsubishi's current Japanese lineup has no obvious candidate — the Pajero is a body-on-frame SUV, not a WRC base — and the president is saying so in terms of what would have to exist first, rather than in terms of budget or appetite.
It is also worth noting where the WRC question comes from. Kishiura observed that wherever he goes in Europe, the conversation turns to the Dakar Rally and the WRC, and that long after the Lancer Evolution left rallying, Mitsubishi staff still wear Ralliart apparel. The demand is external and the brand equity is real; the product to satisfy it is not there.
Our Pajero tracker records claims like these with their source and confidence level. This is an on-record statement from a sitting president — but what it records about the WRC is a precondition, not a plan.
The production car was unveiled on September 2, with a 2.4-liter turbodiesel, an eight-speed automatic and Super Select 4WD-II. As we reported then, Team Mitsubishi Ralliart director Hiroshi Masuoka has spoken of chasing a third straight AXCR title with the new SUV. Kishiura's comments put the president's voice behind that, and place Dakar beyond it.