Eurol Rally Sport forms partnership with MM Technology

Eurol Rally Sport will race slightly different IVECO trucks from what they’re used to at the 2025 Dakar Rally. On Saturday, Martin van den Brink and his son Mitchel van den Brink announced they have formed an alliance with MM Technology, switching away from Team de Rooy after three years together. Both will be in identically prepared IVECO PowerStars.

MM Technology is led by Martin Macík Jr., who won the latest Dakar in the Truck category. Since then, Macík has been busy expanding his team’s operations by selling the Dakar-winning IVECO to Firemen Dakarteam (a Dutch outfit like Eurol) and now building two trucks for the van den Brinks. Eurol Rally Sport will prepare the vehicles in-house once delivered from MM’s shop in the Czech Republic.

Although MM and de Rooy both field the PowerStar, Martin noted they are “otherwise incomparable. MM Technology’s concepts are completely different from De Rooy’s.” For example, according to Mitchel, the Macík truck is “1000 kilograms lighter but also highly reliable.

“MM proved last year that they have a winning truck. Martin Macík won the rally, and due to his much better truck, he was clearly a class above us. It was clear that we needed to adjust our strategy in order to compete for victory.”

Mitchel joined Macík on the class podium when he finished third at the 2024 Dakar in his PowerStar, during which he won Stage #8. It was his fourth Dakar as a driver after making his début in 2021, though he had been involved with the family team since 2019 when he was sixteen. He scored his maiden stage win at the 2023 race en route to a fourth. In May, he won the Morocco Desert Challenge in a Can-Am Maverick X3 for the second year in a row.

Martin has sixteen Dakars under his belt, but his 2024 race was upended early on by a rollover in Stage #2. Unlike his son, he raced an IVECO T-Way with a manual transmission, though the partnership with MM will place him back in an automatic PowerStar.

“We realised (manual) no longer works at the Dakar Rally. The organisation has made the rally tougher and our equipment needs to match that,” Martin commented. “So for me, this new truck is already an improvement compared to the 2024 rally.”

Both of their trucks were put up for sale in March.

Eurol Rally Sport was previously known as Mammoet Rallysport until Eurol Lubricants became the title sponsor in mid-2022. They had switched to IVECOs from de Rooy at that year’s Dakar after racing Renaults.

“We’re extremely proud and happy that our partners made this possible,” continued Mitchel. “But we’re not there yet. In the coming months, we have to do everything to gather the necessary budget to truly contend for the win at the 2025 rally.

“We are happy that the enthusiastic and professional people on our team can handle all of this. We’re an amateur team among the factory teams, and we should be proud of that.

“Now that we have top equipment, we can raise the bar a little higher. Going for the win is my goal.”

The team will begin testing the truck in Morocco in early October. The 2025 Dakar Rally is scheduled for 3–17 January.