One of rallycross’s most successful teams has revealed their hand ahead of the 2024 FIA World Rallycross Championship.
Building on a competitive season in 2023, Hansen World RX Team remains unchanged heading into the new year. 2019 champion Timmy Hansen will drive one of the two Peugeot 208 RX1e cars alongside his brother, 2016 European rallycross champion Kevin Hansen.
In 2024, these electric cars will face a new adversary, with the “Battle of Technologies” concept appearing for the first time. Electric rallycross cars will line up on the grid alongside their sustainably fuelled internal combustion engine counterparts.
The decision to stay with all-electric machinery is definitely unsurprising, with both brothers having been huge advocates for electric rallycross cars since their introduction. Speaking to The Checkered Flag in July 2023, Timmy Hansen had some musings about how to make electric rallycross more popular.
“Maybe the mistake has been not putting these cars side by side,” he suggested. “If people would have seen how fast these cars are, you can cheer for anybody out on track but the electric cars would win nine out of ten races, mainly because we would be miles out ahead right from the start. People haven’t seen how fast the car is in a side by side comparison, and I think, if they had seen it, the attitude would have been very different.”
Now that this “Battle of Technologies” is becoming a reality, he is relishing the challenge. In a Hansen World RX Team press release, he said “the electric will have some strengths, but so will the combustion – which will be a lot lighter in the regulations – so it will be very interesting and for sure make the championship more unpredictable.”
CE Dealer Team, another veteran team of electric rallycross, have also announced their unchanged driver line-up for an all-electric team. As the grid starts to fill up, it will be intriguing to see the balance between internal combustion and electric cars, and then how they fare on the track.
