This year’s Race of Champions event was a roaring success with incredibly close heats throughout both evenings of the competition. On Friday, Sebastien Loeb partnered with Formula 2 driver Victor Martins to claim the Nations Cup for France for the first time since 2004. On Saturday he kept this momentum going to claim the award for individual glory and the rights to call himself the ‘champion of champions’.

Drivers from various disciplines and series came together in the Accor Stadium in Sydney, with the Australians well represented by two different teams and four drivers, spanning off-road and supercars. 

And it was Australia who pushed France all the way over both events, with Team Australia Supercars of Will Brown and Brodie Kosteki taking the final of the Nations Cup against France down to the wire. 

The first heat of the Cup final saw Brown defeat Loeb in the Polaris RZR, earning an early advantage, but the result swung back in France’s favour in the second heat as Martins claimed victory over Kosteki by 1.1 seconds as the rain fell.

A tie-breaker between Martins and Brown in the Supercar Lite Rallycross cars was clinched by Martins by just two tenths of a second to claim France’s third Nation’s Cup.

Victor Martins, undoubtedly the breakout star of the Friday night action, said “It was just so much fun and incredible to win on debut.”

“To win the ROC Nations Cup is pretty special and provides another chance to show my potential,” he said.

ROC has played a role in kickstarting a number of drivers’ careers in the past, including that of former F1 driver Heikki Kovalainen who won the individual event as a relatively unknown World Series driver in 2004, beating seven-time F1 world champion Michael Schumacher to qualify for the final.  While Martins’ career is already underway, the skill and pace he showed over the variety of cars used at ROC can only ever stand a driver in good stead for the future.

Come the individual battles on Saturday night under the lights and again it was a France-Australia final between Loeb and Mostert, this time with the rally champion claiming both heat wins in the final. Loeb’s last win of the event was fairly recent but in entirely different conditions, as he took victory at ROC Snow and Ice in 2022, held in Sweden – conditions he’s perhaps more familiar with than asphalt.

Loeb has now become the driver with the most ROC wins in the event’s 37 year history, moving away from the previous record of four wins that he held jointly with Mattias Ekstrom and Didier Auriol.

Loeb reflected that he felt “really happy and proud” to have taken a record fifth win in an “amazing moment”, especially following their Nations Cup win.

“After the victory in the Nations Cup, it was a relief for me. I said ‘Tomorrow, no pressure, just push’ and it worked,” the Frenchman explained.

Loeb also praised the level of competition this year, saying it was “very impressive”. “This year it was very tight between the drivers, the Supercars driver, the other racing drivers. There were some surprises – Molly [Taylor] beating [Johan] Kristofferson. It was an amazing weekend and we won at the end.”

His rival in the final Chaz Mostert said he was “honoured to be on the same tarmac with [Loeb] tonight”.

Race of Champions’ Co-Founder and President, Fredrik Johnsson reflected on the event as being “worthy” of ROC’s first time in the Southern Hemisphere.