World Rally Championship star Kris Meeke will make the switch to electric motorsport this year, joining the Xite Energy Racing squad for three rounds of this year’s Nitro Rallycross championship – including the British season-opener.
The Northern Irishman has won five WRC events during a career that has included stints at the Mini, Citroën and Toyota works teams, but has been out of full-time competition since the end of 2019. He will now join British squad Xite Racing for three of the Nitro Rallycross events, which will go electric this year with the new 787kW all-wheel-drive FC1-X racer.
Meeke adds to a star line-up at the squad, with Extreme E frontrunner Oli Bennett and former Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button both contesting the full season. He will drive in the events in England, Sweden and Saudi Arabia.
Meeke tested the FC1-X, which can outsprint a Formula 1 car with a 0-60mph time of 1.4secs, in Barcelona earlier this year, and said: “You could immediately see the huge potential not only with the car, but with the whole series that Nitro Rallycross is creating.”
He admitted that he’s never driven any form of electric car before – although he noted that “my brother has a Tesla – and said: “There’s so much to learn. Driving your whole life with a combustion engine in motorsport, you know that elasticity of the engine, you get that intrinsic feeling of how it performs, whereas this is just something completely different.”
But he added: “All motorsport has a steering wheel and a set of pedals, and rallycross is probably the most similar to rallying – albeit with more cars around you. “I’m excited, it’s something new to me. Rallycross is something I’ve always been intrigued by and any machine that puts out the equivalent of 1000 horsepower… if that doesn’t get your juices flowing then I don’t know what does!”
Meeke has contested a single round of the World Rallycross Championship in the past, but that was back in 2013.
The Nitro Rallycross season begins at Lydden Hill in Kent on June 18/19.
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