After confirming his return to racing for a new campaign in the Open 2WD category of the RallyX championship, Marcus Norman has taken advantage of the off-season to step up his game…
In fact, it’s with an all-new engine that the Mercedes CLK driver will be back in action in May, when the RallyX 2024 season kicks off at the Tierp Arena.
“As far as the chassis is concerned, we don’t have much to optimize. To tell the truth, I’m very happy with the car’s performance level. In fact, we’ve focused our efforts on the engine and cooling system, in addition to other related aspects.”
While Marcus Norman saw his 2023 campaign come to an abrupt end in Grenland last August, the Luleå driver may well have a few surprises in store for his rivals this year.
“We will have a brand new engine for this season. Our original plan was to use the new engine at the end of last season for the last two races in Grenland and Höljes, but the timeframe turned out to be longer than expected. We’re now going to use the next few weeks to test this engine and make sure that we can start the 2024 season in the best possible conditions. I’m really looking forward to the first engine run. What’s certain is that on paper this engine should be even more extreme than its predecessor. The other difference is that we’ve made it much more suited to the challenges of rallycross.”
Indeed, after a 2023 season in which Marcus opted for a naturally aspirated Wankel engine, the latter has opted to return to a turbo version, as was already the case in 2022.
“When we arrived in 2022 with this turbo Wankel engine, we didn’t have too much hindsight. We didn’t know if our approach would work, because this package had never been used in this configuration before. It was like breaking new ground for us. At the time, we’d done everything we could to make it work, but we ran into some technical challenges that complicated the way we were able to operate the engine.”
“This is the main reason why we decided to go back to a naturally aspirated version in 2023 but it soon became clear that it was becoming more and more difficult for us to keep up with the best. Our car is a bit heavy, so I definitely needed more power. So for last year’s Grenland event we put a turbo back in and, despite our engine failure during the weekend, I could clearly feel the benefits with a completely different car to drive. In any case, it confirmed our choices and this year we’ll be tackling the RallyX championship with a turbo engine based on a three-rotor Wankel block”
