GRS Team opens cross-country rally arm

Junior single-seater team Global Racing Service will expand operations to include a cross-country rally division in 2024, competing in the Spanish Cross-Country Rally Championship‘s (CERTT) T3 and T4 categories starting at this weekend’s Rally TT Jaén Mar de Olivos. Pau Navarro and team boss Josep Trinidad are named on the entry list as their drivers.

Also known as GRS Team for short, the outfit primarily competes in the F4 Spanish Championship and Eurocup-3. They finished eleventh in the 2023 F4 Spanish standings with a rotation of drivers, while Alexander Jacoby and Douwe Dedecker comprise their 2024 lineup in the series. A multi-car effort during the inaugural Eurocup-3 season ended with three runner-up finishes courtesy of Cenyu Han and Alpine Academy member Nikola Tsolov.

In February and March, GRS fielded cars for Dedecker, Bianca Bustamante, and Lia Block—herself an off-road racer—in the Spanish-based Formula Winter Series, with Dedecker scoring a podium at Ricardo Tormo. The team has also raced in the Formula 4 UAE Championship and Formula Renault Eurocup. They débuted in Spanish F4 in 2018.

Trinidad and Navarro will race Can-Am Maverick X3 cars with Manuel Navarro Dominguez and Fausto Mota as navigators, respectively.

Navarro typically races in the World Rally-Raid Championship, driving a Can-Am in the SSV (then T4) class during the 2022 and 2023 seasons with a win at the 2022 Andalucía Rally. He moved up to the Ultimate category for the 2024 Dakar Rally, where he retired after a crash. Although the latest W2RC round, last week’s BP Ultimate Rally-Raid, took place in Spain and Portugal, Navarro opted to skip it and enter the Rallye Sierra Morena. Conversely, Mota and Manuel Navarro both competed in the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid, the former finishing second in SSV as the navigator for Ricardo Ramilo while the latter and Ultimate driver Jose Luis Garcia retired.

The Rally TT Jaén Mar de Olivos, the first round of the CERTT, begins Saturday.