Months and months and months and months ago Sandra floated the idea of going to see this thing called the Race of Champions (ROC). All I knew about it was that it involved watching racing around a track at Wembley and that wasn’t like the traditional motor sports racing that I know Sandra is keenly interested in. Before today’s event I’d been meaning to look it up to see what it was all about but for some reason or another I never had time so I only really found out how it worked when Sandra was showing me the programme!

The ROC is run at the end of each year with a number of countries represented by two drivers – one racing and one rally. This year’s event involved two competitions a Nations Cup (country basis) and Champion of Champions (individual basis.)

The two events are run elimination style with the winner of each heat proceeding to the semi-final and then the final. Or in the case of the individual event the winner proceeding to a quarter-final, semi-final and then final.

To make things more interesting James, the perennial gambling man, proposed a bit of a wager with each of us selecting two teams and a bet of £10 each – a fiver going on each event. James currently has a wicked winning streak on wagers and by choosing my team purely on good looks I wasn’t sure I could break the streak! Sandra was in with a chance however having chosen the team with Schuey in it. These are the teams selected by us:

– Sandra – Germany and Scotland
– James – Finland and France
– Me – USA and Scandinavia

Before the start of the ROC, however, we all had an event we had to master ourselves – LUNCH! James was kind enough to volunteer, well actually kind enough to accept Sandra and I volunteering him, to make lunch for us – a delicious roast chicken and stuffing baguette and fixings accompanied by chocolate mudcake, crisps and fruit. Here we are enjoying the meal. I’m sure those around us were well jealous:

I must admit, not being the biggest motorsports fan, ROC was a lot of fun. The actual racing itself was surprisingly exciting – probably because of the track itself when you couldn’t tell until the last few 50 metres who was going to win. Plus it was fairly short and sweet and you got to see the real skill of the drivers on the entire track. Between races and events we also had entertainment in the form of cheerleaders, stunt bikes, stunt cars etc. No wonder it took nearly seven hours!

And the results. Well, good news all around. Sandra took out the Nations Cup with Germany triumphing over James’ Finnish drivers. She also generously gave me her Scotland team for the individual event but turns out I didn’t need it as I ended up taking out the Champion of Champions when Mattias Ekström of Scandinavia took out her Schuey in the final. Poor James. Here are the pics of the winners:

Oh I forgot to mention the cars which were pretty cool. This year’s event featured five cars: a dune buggy, a high power sports car, a world rally car, a large touring car and a Super 2000 specification saloon (this I got from wikipedia – heh heh.) The dune buggy was definitely my favourite car.