North America is a great market and has one of the best racing cultures in the world. It was always our aim is to be part of it and gain and share experience. We are very pleased to welcome VEX Performace team, who have travelled all the way from Calgary, Alberta. VEX Performance is a leader in rally services and other related activities in Western Canada and with many common goals, it was a very good opportunity to meet and make very interesting plans for the future. One of the VEX Performance representatives and rally driver – Johnny Summers – shared his thoughts on the trip to the Samsonas Motorsport base.
We are here at Samsonas in Lithuania to see the incredible new sequential gearbox that we will be using in our Subaru rally car, as well as the Samsonas dampers. It’s been incredible to meet everyone, get a tour of the facility, see how they put everything together, how much care and attention and intelligence goes into everything they do and how much diligence they put into it, and to learn from them and with them and share ideas.
The first thing I noticed when we got here was how diligent everyone was about their work, how everything was done in house, the heat treatment, the incredible thought process they had for every single step along the way, which is part of what they do and why they do it. A lot of it has come from real world testing, rallying, racing both from their customers and their racing team. And you can see how everything they build has benefited from that. And they continue to think through all these processes, what to add, when to add it and why, or whether they should add certain features. And they make sure that the product is efficient for the customer, meaning it’s cost-effective and yet highly competitive and very impressive.
I am pleased to say that VEX and Samsonas will be partnering in many ways. We will be using the dampers and their sequential gearbox in my Subaru rally car in the Western Canadian Rally Championship. And then Martynas Samsonas is coming over with his Subaru rally car that he’s building, and it’s some very interesting things that they’re doing with the car. It’s light and powerful and it will be very strong, especially in the suspension, and I think with Martynas behind the wheel it will be extremely fast. They will be competing in some of the Canadian Rally Championship events in Western Canada, possibly an event in Eastern Canada and some in the USA. So we’ll be helping with the logistics, storage and maintenance of the car at VEX Performance. And I can’t wait to see how fast Martynas will be on a lot of stages in our area. I think it’s going to be very interesting and really fun.
