Hedstrom for World Rallycross Championship

Double Swedish rallycross champions Hedstroms Motorsport will contest the new-for-2014 FIA World Rallycross Championship with lead driver Peter Hedstrom. The team are also pursuing options to run a second driver and compete in the new teams championship.

“Peter will do the full championship, and we are speaking to lots of people at the moment about the second car, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next months,” said team principle Anders Hedstrom. ‘We have three cars, and we are able to run them all no problem. Maybe Helga (the MkI Fabia) could be used in the European championship, we have some drivers interested in doing that too.”

More than capable of looking after the cars, Hedstroms are relatively inexperienced at running their own cars in the highest tier in rallycross. The 2013 season didn’t bring the success the Torsby-based team craved, but Hedstrom thinks they have the solution for next year.

“Our guys are very good and they work very hard, but they are not full-time rallycross engineers. We are looking for an engineer who can bring some good rallycross knowledge with them into the team, that is where we are missing out. With someone like that involved we can be strong, the small teams still have a good chance, that is one of the reasons why the World Rallycross Championship will be so good.”

No strangers to running more than one car, the team ran two Skoda Fabia’s at the start of the 2013 RallycrossRX season before splitting with second driver Knut Ove Borseth. In 2012 they ran Swedish rally star PG Andersson in their home round of the European championship at Holjes, both cars making the final. Another former-wrc driver to drive for the team was Thomas Radstrom, who drove in the Swedish championship last year in the the Skoda Fabia MkI. “The car that was built at the start of 2013 just needs stickers putting on and it is ready to race. The other one is being taken back to a clean bodyshell to make it like new again and the MkI is also being completely rebuilt.”

With the newest of the Fabia’s ready to go, Peter Hedstrom will race at the ‘Winter Week’ at Umea in the North of Sweden. The event features more than 20 sporting disciplines, rallycross is new for 2013 and will be overseen by Radstrom who has helped the organisers devise a rallycross track within the local trotting track. Umea won’t be Hedstroms first outing since the end of the RallycrossRX season. He successfully defended his Swedish Rallycross title at Kinnekulle last month, and raced in the NGK Masters folkrace event that is backed by sponsor Liqui Moly, but there he had less success, rolling his Saab. Hedstrom has been busy with sponsor work, notably with main sponsor Auto Experten. They were recently involved in a television commercial for Swedish television channel TV4, shown ten times each day.

“We filmed the advert in the middle of Stockholm. It took all day, we started at 09:00 and finished at 23:00. They had 40 camera crew, it was a lot of fun to be involved with,” said Peter Hedstrom, who plays the father in the 31 second clip. Watch it below.

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[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvm_2KCTSg0[/tube]