Time for testing

Once the first round of the FIA World Rallycross Championship at Montalegre was finished, there were some drivers testing better machinery which can bring some future one-off drives.

After a slow start in the qualifiers of the Super 1600 class, Danish ace Ulrik Linnemann finished second in his semifinal and then won in the final. He also left his FWD Peugeot 208 S1600 for a while to drive the prime 208 WRX model as Pailler Competition called him to try the French machine, and seemed specially happy with the 600 hp French monster.

Pailler Competition is a regular contender in both the Euro RX and in the Rallycross France competition with Jonathan and Fabien Pailler, and both normally do a one-off World RX participation at Lohéac, in France, and their last World RX outings were only with the family members. Along with the photos, no more information was released so it's hard to point that this may seal a future drive in the supercars for Linnemann, although the rallycross ladder brought some good talent to the World RX recently, like Reinis Nitiss, Kevin Eriksson and Janis Baumanis, so here is hope if he keeps his form.

At Montalegre the driver in test was no other than Oliver Solberg, the son of Petter Solberg. Set Promotion, a multi-champion Super 1600 team, invited Oliver to do some testing with their Renault Twingo. Oliver is still a 14 year old kid, but he already done rally co-driving with Petter himself and has karting experience along with the crosskarts, which is where he competes now and seems to show the same talent of the father.

Set Promotion was the team of the current Super 1600 champion and World RX Team Austria driver Janis Baumanis, but also was the team which got S1600 titles with Timur Timerzyanov (2010), Andreas Bakkerud (2011 and 2012) and Reinis Nitiss (2013), which means that they only lost the title in one year out of the last five and all these champions are already World RX drivers, so their credentials in the matter of preparing young talents are pretty high.

Giving the fact that most supercar newcomers appeared around the twenty years old mark, we may have to wait a lot to see if Oliver will be the expected team mate to Petter to make PSRX able to fight for a teams title.

PHOTOS: Petter Solberg, Linnemann Motorsport