Menu Close

Category: Uncategorized

R-Box 2.023 goes Toyota!

Despite our enthusiasm, sky-high commitment and perseverance, we have to throw in the towel and the BMW E30 M3 story is put to an end. The ratio fun/cost derailed completely and common sense has forced us to pull the plug on the project.

Of course, the end of the M3 story doesn’t mean we’ll stop rallying. On the contrary, we are more motivated than ever and start again with a clean slate, a brand new car and tons of enthusiasm!

From the first second it was certain that it was going to be a rear-wheel drive car again. However, the availability of these is getting smaller and smaller. We briefly considered staying in the BMW family, in the form of an E36, E46 or 1 Series with a rock-solid S54 engine. But looking to the future, we were no longer convinced of this.

We took a completely different approach and went shopping at Toyota Gazoo Racing in Cologne, where we put one of the last remaining Toyota GT86 CS-R3s in our shopping cart.

It is not immediately the fastest R3, but it is a real factory car with a high fun content and rear-wheel drive! In addition, it does not look particularly bad and the flat-4 sound makes it a bit typical. We fell in love instantly.

In any case, R-Box is ready for a new adventure from 2023!

See you then!

Report Rallye de Trois-Ponts 2022

Unfortunately, it has become 2 bridges instead of 3!

The Trois-Ponts rally was the first on the R-Box rally calendar 2022 and was mainly intended to get race kilometers in the legs and to evaluate the winter updates.

A lot of hard work has been done on the car in the winter months, and as usual this again results in numerous updates. Obviously, the pain point from the past, the entire charging system, has been completely reviewed and renewed. Because we love challenges, we have also completely mixed up our note system.

Add to that the refreshing -7°C at the start of the first test, and all the necessary ingredients were present to have no idea how the first kilometers were going to go.

From Sezoen(s) to Sezoen(s)

Unfortunately, our last performance dates back to the Sezoensrally 2019 and this of course does not only have to do with corona. We had been hanging on the sucker for a while, did not find the right feeling and the understeer lever continued to worry us with many a hangover as a result. Our task with a broken topmount in the 2019 edition was a bit of the low point, but also the trigger point to realize that the R-Box M3 was struggling with a fundamental problem.

Report Rally of Haspengouw 2019

After a very hectic winter update, with some radical changes, we were of course very much looking forward to a first confrontation with the Haspengouw concrete strips.

For the observant media watchers it had been clear for some time that from now on Isidoor Smets will knit the notes together and that we decided to focus on the full M-Cup. Through Isidoor’s experience, the bar is indirectly raised a bit higher, even though it is not the intention to put more pressure on myself. And even though I don’t know anything about knitting myself, I’m going to do my utmost not to drop stitches.

(Photos Wim Becker, Jérome Deskeuvre, Frank Pacqué)