The 46-year-old Norwegian Crosskart driver Andre Bendixen will be making his return to the 2021 RallyX Nordic season. He hopes for it to be a better season as he brings with him the more improved Kamikaz Crosskart that he has prepared over the winter, he is now set to do a full campaign in the CrossCar/Crosskart class.
Bendixen has earlier been one of the more dominant rallycross drivers in his local Norwegian Rallycross Championship where he used to drive in the 2400cc Supernational class before taking almost a ten-year long break. That was until he decided to get back in to action last season when he joined the RallyX Nordic season-opener at Höljes.
On his first day of the return to rallycross, it was a really difficult day as he ended up in twenty-ninth place in the intermediate standings of a thirty-eight-strong entry field. He had some more luck on the second round of the All-Star Magic Weekend that was held that weekend as he managed to improve his pace and was consistently within the top half of the field in the qualifying sessions, and reached the semi-final.
At the Arvika round that was held about five weekends after Höljes the issues continued and with that it led to a withdrawal at the season-finale at Nysum in hopes of solving the problems. Now the Norwegian has hopes his last season misfortune will led to a better season this year as he will be arriving at Nysum in May for the season-opener fully prepared and has the championship crown in sight.
“When I was assessing what to race last year, CrossCar/Crosskart looked to be a great deal of fun – but my mistake was to think that I would be able to easily transfer my previous rallycross experience across, because it soon became clear that it wouldn’t be quite as simple as that!” Bendixen said.
“CrossCar/Crosskart demands a very different driving style and set-up, and whilst my pre-season expectations had been to push for the semi-finals or even finals, at both Höljes and Arvika I found myself way down the results sheet.“
“Höljes certainly wasn’t the easiest of weekends to begin my CrossCar/Crosskart career, with such a large field and some very big names, including the reigning FIA World Rallycross Champion, but it was a lot of fun! I actually got to race directly against Timmy Hansen in Q1 during the second round and beat him, which was pretty satisfying, but overall, the results were still some way beneath my objectives.“
“I knew we needed to do some major work if we wanted to be competitive at this level, so we took the car apart and rebuilt it and spent a whole weekend testing at Arvika to try to figure out the best way to work with the suspension. Lars Andersson from Power Sweden in Karlstad helped me with the shock absorbers and balance of the car, and that definitely paid off as we made a big step forward. We subsequently entered the last round of the Swedish Championship and finished fifth, which corroborated that progress and proved the pace was there.“
“We’ve made more upgrades over the winter, including a new engine from Eriksson Motor & Engineering, and I’m very confident that the car is much faster now. After everything I learned last year, I’m pretty optimistic that the driver will be much faster, too!“
“In truth, I’ll need to be if I’m going to keep up with these younger guys, because some of them are ridiculously quick! It’s shaping up to be a hell of a fight again – it seems to get tougher every season in RallyX Nordic – but I’ll be disappointed if we’re not in the mix for podiums. At the end of the day, I want to win like everybody else – and I want to do that by beating the very best.”
