Martynas Samsonas is visiting Spain this weekend, where he is taking part in the final stage of the Spanish Rallycross on the Miranda de Ebro circuit with the RMC Motorsport team. Martynas will be in the Toyota Yaris N5, and he has shared some thoughts on the upcoming competitions and behind the scenes of the N5
It’s hard to say anything at the moment because I personally do not have much experience with RX. With my father and my cousin we raced autocross, somewhere between 1996 and maybe 2003. We won a number of competitions, then the Lithuanian championship in the buggy class and also the Baltic championship. Later, in 2003, we turned to rallying. Father and my son Kajus mainly drove autocross. Kajus also won the championship. We also tried to do tests with the BMW M3X, where we even broke the record on the Kulbiloh track in Estonia, then the Estonians immediately thought about how they could limit our car 🙂 I remember that I was driving with M. Varža in a 2006 with his BMW. Then I redid the plastic fenders and hoods. And they wanted to ban them right after the season 🙂 But then we had old problems with the engine and we did not compete anymore. That’s how it ended with this discipline.
The current journey is simply to work with the Spanish – support, testing, developing products and shock absorbers, gathering information. We just want to keep the N5 spirit, because maybe 2025 N5 cars moving up to the FIA class. I do not know the exact nuances yet and I do not know where that confirmation will be. Maybe ERC, we will see. From next year we will have a much more reliable and better turbine, very similar to the one in our the Škoda Fabia N5+. There are also many improvements to the suspension, both from us and from the Spaniards. It is true that we will have newer version engine in homologation from 2025.
The work is really progressing at a fast pace. In addition, we are planning to drive 6-7 rallies in Spain and Portugal next year with our Škoda Fabia N5, which is already homologated, although we have made only minimal changes – muffler diameter, catalytic converter and steel hoods.
We will see how it goes with the RX. There are no big plans. We just want to work and see what can be done better, both with the machine and with spreading the word about N5. We have 11 cars on the grid in this competition, which is really quite a lot.
The live broadcast of the competition will start on Sunday at 12:30 Lithuanian time on the YouTube platform