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Sebastien Vettel Wins the 2015 Race of Champions Held in London

The Race of Champions is a great idea that’s been around one way or the other ever since 1988. Over the course of time, though, it suffered some modifications that ended up transforming it into a hell of a show.
2015 ROC 15 photos
Photo: ROC
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Held in open top arenas - usually football stadiums - it’s one of the few such European events, as racing competitions over there usually take place on long tracks that don’t allow spectators to see all the action at once. The Race of Champion (ROC, from now on) comes as a very packed, condensed experience for the whole audience, and the fact that it’s a duel between some of the best drivers only comes to help.

After a season that started pretty well for the German driver who moved from Red Bull to Ferrari, the competition quickly became a two-horse race between the two MERCEDES-AMG PETRONAS drivers - Hamilton and Rosberg - with Vettel only sporadically looking like he could upset the duo. While he was never going to win the title, Vettel could have finished second if the two races had had a different outcome. But they didn’t, so that left the German waiting for the next Formula One season.

Until then, though, there’s this little festival of all things motorsport called ROC he was invited to attend. The list of drivers didn’t include some of the famous names we’ve seen in past competitions - people like Sebastien Loeb, for example, and neither did the new Formula One champion show up - but that doesn’t mean the roster wasn’t filled with current or former multiple-champions. Besides Vettel, there was Tom Kristensen, nine-times 24 Hours of Le Mans winner.

Coincidentally or not, these two were the ones who made it into the final, after three eliminatory stages that saw them dispatch famous names such as David Coulthard, Jason Plato, Petter Solberg or Nico Hülkenberg. The all-German three-race final turned into a two-race one as Vettel won the first two, so the conclusion came early.

However, despite dominating the individual section of the ROC, the Germans didn’t fare similarly well in the Nations Cup. The team made up of Vettel and Hülkenberg made it to the final where they came across one of the two hosting teams featuring Jason Plato and Andy Priaulx.

Andy Priaulx, the WTCC Champion, won his first race against Vettel while Jason Plato lost to Nico Hülkenberg, so it was down to the last race against the two winners so far. Priaulx defeated Hülkenberg to deny Germany a seventh Nations Cup title and grant England its first.

Below you can see two clips from the action-packed event that took place this weekend, and further down there’s a photo gallery as well.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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