While Kristof Bex took advantage of the penultimate round of the Belgian championship to secure another national title at Maasmechelen, the Volvo S40 driver has not forgotten his visit to Buxtehude last August for the final round of the RallyX 2024 championship.
Ranked among the leaders in the Open 2WD category, the multiple Belgian champion lived up to his billing against the best Scandinavian specialists on the Estering track.
Third in the intermediate classification in the first race of the weekend, with three second places to his credit in qualifying, Kristof Bex was unable to do better than seventh after being eliminated in the semi-final. This minor setback did not prevent the Belgian driver from taking his revenge the following day, when he qualified for a final for the first time.
With two Top 3 finishes in the qualifying heats, the driver of the Volvo S40 took fifth place in the final, just 1.3 seconds behind his compatriot Yorick Maeyninckx, who secured his first podium finish at this level of racing.
It was a source of great satisfaction for Kristof Bex, who had not expected to achieve such a high level of efficiency in the RallyX championship.
‘It was an interesting experience to take on the Swedish and Norwegian drivers and see what we could achieve against them,’ says Kristof.
‘I have to admit that we put in some good performances and weren’t that far off the podium. It’s something we didn’t necessarily expect. In the back of our minds, we were thinking that qualifying for the final could be within our grasp, but what we saw above all was that our speed was better than we could have imagined.’
Indeed, in theory, the 350bhp of his Volvo S40 was hardly a match for the monsters of power lined up by Simon Tiger and Viktor Johansson.
‘For us, it was a different exercise to what we’re used to, because the leaders in this championship have a lot more power. They’re much more efficient on the starts, while on the long straights, it was easy to see on our GoPro that they were quickly taking a five or six car lead. On the other hand, we were able to make up for this deficit by being more efficient on the twisty, technical sections of the track.”
‘One thing is certain, when you are up against Simon Tiger on the grid, you know that nothing is going to be easy. The key is to be able to take better starts than them or to avoid losing too much time in the first few metres of the race, because we’ve seen that we have the potential to challenge them in terms of speed on a flying lap.”
Like many Belgian and Dutch drivers, Kristof makes no secret of the fact that he would be delighted to see the RallyX championship expand to venues closer to home.
‘In any case, the RallyX atmosphere is really nice and I don’t think anyone regrets having made the trip to Buxtehude. Everyone was happy to be in Estering for three days and it was the same for the public, who were treated to a very high quality show’, Kristof points out.
‘For us, taking part in more events in Scandinavia would mean a much bigger budget, much more time to devote to Rallycross and many more kilometres to cover. On my scale, it’s not that easy to set up. I’m the owner of a garage with 20 people under my responsibility, so I can’t do everything, but there’s no doubt that if the RallyX championship could develop a little further south with events in Belgium and Holland, it would be a very good thing for us’.
