Reaume Brothers Racing and MBM Motorsports have joined forces and will brign in a champion from overseas. On Friday, RBR announced they have formed an alliance with MBM for the 2021 NASCAR Xfinity Series season, though the extent of the partnership was not immediately revealed. Later in the day, NASCAR Whelen Euro Series driver Loris Hezemans revealed he will drive the RBR/MBM #13 Chevrolet Camaro for two races beginning next Saturday at Phoenix Raceway.
“We’re excited to announce we have formed a partnership with @MBMMotorsports in the @NASCAR_Xfinity series,” read a tweet from RBR. “Carl Long & his group have established a great team. We’re thrilled to work alongside them. Additional details will be announced in the near future.”
Reaume Brothers Racing are a Camping World Truck Series team that currently field the #33 and #34 for a variety of drivers; for tonight’s race at Las Vegas, Jesse Iwuji and B.J. McLeod will pilot the RBR #33 and #34, respectively. During the 2020 Xfinity season, RBR partnered with RSS Racing to operate the #93 RSS car primarily driven by Myatt Snider. The car’s owner points were sold to newly-formed Big Machine Racing before the 2021 season but RSS retained a second car and their RBR alliance with the #23. While it was officially an RSS entry for the first three races of the season, RBR prepared the vehicle, as highlighted when Natalie Decker made her Xfinity début on the Daytona road course in a Chevrolet while RSS had switched to Ford.
Our Motorsports, whose newly-opened #03 is locked out of the grid with no owner points, forged their own alliance with the #23 to field Tyler Reddick in last week’s Homestead race. The team announced on Thursday that they had assumed full responsibility of the car, which Reddick is scheduled to drive in Saturday’s Vegas event.
MBM’s #13 is primarily run by David Starr, who joined the team at the Daytona RC for the rest of the season (Chad Finchum ran the opener on Daytona’s oval); although Hezemans’s addition changes those plans, it is possible that he moves to the team’s #61. The team also fields the #66 for Timmy Hill.
Hezemans, the 2019 Euro Series Elite 1 (now EuroNASCAR PRO) champion, finished third in the 2020 standings with victories in the opener at Vallelunga and the finale at Valencia. In three seasons at the top level of European stock car racing, he has never finished lower than fourth in points, while his seven career wins are fifth most in PRO division history.
During his 2019 title campaign, he briefly dabbled in American racing when he made his Xfinity debut as a road course ringer at Road America. Driving the #99 for B.J. McLeod Motorsports, he finished twenty-second. Hailing from Amsterdam, Hezemans is the first Dutch driver to compete in a NASCAR national series race.
In addition to the Phoenix race, Hezemans will also run the Charlotte Motor Speedway round on 29 May.
“I am very excited to announce that I will be joining Reaume Brothers Racing for the NASCAR Xfinity Series at Phoenix on March 13th,” Hezemans stated. “My number one priority for this race weekend is to bring the car home and gain as much experience as possible. Without any practice or qualifying the learning curve will be a big step but I am fully up for the challenge. With this experience in Phoenix I hope to continue to progress through the different size oval tracks throughout the year.”
Hezemans is far from the only driver to have NASCAR experience on both sides of the pond. Since Team FJ‘s takeover of the European side in 2013 to form the Euro Series, three of the four champions have gone on to race in America. Conversely, Snider ran the full Euro Series Elite 2 (now EuroNASCAR 2) season in 2019, while NASCAR Vice President of Racing Development Ben Kennedy has won races in both America and Europe.