Volkswagen's initial involvement in the World Rally Championship ran from 1978 to 1990, during which the team competed with various specifications of the Volkswagen Golf. The team was not a front-running manufacturer in this era and withdrew from WRC competition in 1990.
Volkswagen returned to high-profile motorsport with the Dakar Rally from 2003. The team entered the Tarek 2WD buggy in 2003, then developed successive generations of the Race Touareg for subsequent campaigns. Volkswagen won the Dakar Rally in 2009, 2010, and 2011, with Giniel de Villiers, Carlos Sainz, and Nasser Al-Attiyah respectively claiming outright victories. After three consecutive wins, Volkswagen ended its Dakar campaign in 2011.
Volkswagen staged a partial WRC return in 2011, contesting four rounds — Finland, Germany, Catalunya, and Great Britain — with seven different drivers. In November 2011, the team announced a multi-year contract with French rally star Sébastien Ogier and co-driver Julien Ingrassia.
For 2012, Volkswagen Motorsport conducted a full WRC development campaign using Škoda Fabia S2000 cars while completing preparation of the Polo R WRC. Ogier drove every round of the campaign, while the second car was shared between Andreas Mikkelsen and Kevin Abbring. Ogier's fifth place in Sardinia remained the best overall finish ever recorded by an S2000 car in the WRC. In October 2012, Jari-Matti Latvala and co-driver Miikka Anttila were signed alongside Ogier for the 2013 full factory entry.
Volkswagen entered the 2013 season as a fully-fledged manufacturer with the Volkswagen Polo R WRC. Andreas Mikkelsen joined Ogier and Latvala from the fourth round in Portugal, registered under a secondary entry designated Volkswagen Motorsport II. The team won its first WRC event in Sweden — Ogier dominating across half the stages — and from there built an unstoppable run. Ogier won the drivers' championship, the first of four straight titles.
The pattern repeated through 2014 and 2015, with Volkswagen taking both manufacturers' and drivers' titles each year. Ogier won his fourth consecutive drivers' championship in 2016, and the team secured their fourth consecutive manufacturers' title in the same season.
Just days after the 2016 Wales Rally GB, Volkswagen announced its withdrawal from WRC competition at the end of the season. The decision came as a surprise given that the team had already invested significantly in developing a new Polo for the 2017 regulations. No official reason was given, but the announcement followed the Volkswagen Group's diesel emissions scandal, which had prompted a broad review of the company's motorsport activities.
In 2018, Volkswagen Motorsport returned to WRC with the Volkswagen Polo GTI R5, a customer Rally2 car, debuting at Rally Catalunya with Petter Solberg and Eric Camilli. In November 2019, Volkswagen announced it would end all internal combustion engine-based motorsport activities as part of the group's shift toward electric vehicle manufacturing.
Volkswagen's 2013–2016 WRC campaign represents one of the most dominant four-year runs in the sport's history: four consecutive doubles (drivers' and manufacturers' championships) without a gap. The Polo R WRC's engineering standard raised the bar for rivals and forced significant development responses from Hyundai and Toyota. Ogier's four consecutive titles under the Volkswagen banner placed him among the most successful WRC drivers of all time, second only to Loeb's nine. The team's abrupt departure left an open field for the 2017 season and accelerated the competitive transition to the new manufacturer cohort.