Rallying is a wide-ranging form of motorsport with various competitive motoring elements such as speed tests, navigation tests, or the ability to reach waypoints or a destination at a prescribed time or average speed. Rallies may be short in the form of trials at a single venue, or several thousand miles long in an extreme endurance rally.
Petter Solberg is a Norwegian former professional rally and rallycross driver.
The World Rally Championship is the highest level of global competition in the motorsport discipline of rallying, owned and governed by the FIA. There are separate championships for drivers, co-drivers, manufacturers and teams. The series currently consists of 13 three to four-day rally events driven on surfaces ranging from gravel and tarmac to snow and ice. Each rally is usually split into 15–25 special stages which are run against the clock on up to 350 kilometres (220 mi) of closed roads.
Carlos Sainz Cenamor is a Spanish rally driver. He won the World Rally Championship drivers' title with Toyota in 1990 and 1992, and finished runner-up four times. Constructors' world champions to have benefited from Sainz are Subaru (1995), Toyota (1999) and Citroën. In the 2018 season he was one of the official drivers of the Team Peugeot Total. He received the Princess of Asturias Sports Award in 2020. Sainz founded the Acciona | Sainz XE Team to join Extreme E and has competed in the first two seasons alongside Laia Sanz.
Juha Matti Pellervo Kankkunen is a Finnish former rally driver. His factory team career in the World Rally Championship lasted from 1983 to 2002. He won 23 world rallies and four drivers' world championship titles, which were both once records in the series. Both Sébastien Loeb and Sébastien Ogier have since collected more world titles, but no driver was able to repeat Kankkunen's feat of becoming a world champion with three different manufacturers until Ogier matched this achievement in 2020.
The Race of Champions (ROC) is an international motorsport event held at the end/start of each year, featuring some of the world's best racing and rally drivers. It is the only competition in the world where stars from Formula One, World Rally Championship, IndyCar, NASCAR, sportscars and touring cars compete against each other, going head-to-head in identical cars.
Club Baloncesto Gran Canaria – Claret, S.A.D., currently known as Dreamland Gran Canaria due to sponsorship, is a professional basketball club based in Las Palmas, Spain. The team plays in the Liga ACB. Their home venue is the Gran Canaria Arena.
Mattias Ekström is a racing and rally driver from Sweden. He competed in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters for Audi from 2001 until his retirement in 2018, and has been competing in the FIA World Rallycross Championship, also for Audi, since its inception in 2014. He is a FIA World Rallycross Champion, a two-time DTM champion and a four-time winner of the Race of Champions.
The Rally de Portugal is a rally competition held in Portugal. First held in 1967, the seventh running of the race, the 7º TAP Rallye de Portugal was the third event in the inaugural FIA World Rally Championship in 1973. The rally remained on the WRC calendar for the next 29 years, and after being dropped for 2002–2006, the event returned to Portugal in 2007. During the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, Rally de Portugal was a mixed event between asphalt and gravel. Currently it is an all-gravel event.
Harri "Rovis" Rovanperä is a Finnish rally driver who competed in the World Rally Championship from 1993 to 2006. He drove for SEAT (1997–00), Peugeot (2001–04), Mitsubishi (2005) and Red Bull Škoda Team (2006). Rovanperä was known as a loose surface specialist. He is the father of 2022 and 2023 World Rally driver's championship winner Kalle Rovanperä. He was married to Tiina Rovanperä.
The 2009 Race of Champions was the 22nd running of the event, and took place on November 3–4, 2009 at the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China. It was the first time that the event took place outside of Europe and Africa. It was also the first international sports event to be held in the "Bird's Nest" stadium since the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The 2003 Race of Champions took place on November 28–30 at Gran Canaria for the final time. It was also the last year for three-car teams in the Nations' Cup, with the focus on rally drivers fading after this year's event due to the later stadium-based venues using all-tarmac tracks.
The 2002 Race of Champions took place on November 29 to December 1 at Gran Canaria. It was the 15th running of the event, and the 11th at Gran Canaria.
The 2001 Race of Champions took place on December 7 to 9 at Gran Canaria. It was the 14th running of the event, and the 10th running at Gran Canaria. There was a slight format change for this year – The International Masters event was replaced by the Junior Masters event, open to rally drivers under the age of 30. Seeding for the main Race of Champions event was no longer awarded on the basis of having won a WRC title, but places were awarded for having posted the fastest times in the Nations Cup.
The 1999 Race of Champions took place on December 5 at Gran Canaria. It was the 12th running of the event, and the eighth running at Gran Canaria. It was the first year for the new Nations' Cup Competition, which saw teams of three competitors – a rally driver, a circuit racing driver and a motorcyclist – team up to represent their nation and compete for national glory.
The 1998 Race of Champions took place on December 6 at Gran Canaria. It was the 11th running of the event, and the 7th running at Gran Canaria. It was the final year that the event was exclusively for rally drivers. Colin McRae was the victor after beating brother Alister in the final.
The 1997 Race of Champions took place on December 7 at Gran Canaria. It was the 10th running of the event, and the 6th running at Gran Canaria. Carlos Sainz defeated sometime Subaru WRC teammate Colin McRae to become Champion of Champions.
Benito Iván Guerra Latapí is a Mexican rally driver competing for Citroën Racing, a privateer team in the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) in 2013, with his co-driver Borja Rozada.
The 2014 Race of Champions was the 26th running of the event, and took place over 13–14 December 2014 at Bushy Park circuit in Barbados. The Nations' Cup was won by the Nordic team of Tom Kristensen and Petter Solberg, while the individual contest was won by David Coulthard, who beat Pascal Wehrlein 2–0 in the final. Barbados won the inaugural ROC Caribbean competition.
The 2017 Race of Champions was the 28th running of the event, and took place over 21–22 January 2017 at Marlins Park baseball stadium in Miami. Juan Pablo Montoya took the Championship and became the champion for the first time. Sebastian Vettel, after teammate Pascal Wehrlein was sidelined after a crash, single-handedly won the Nations' Cup for Germany.
Marcus Grönholm 
Didier Auriol 
Armin Schwarz 
Flavio Alonso 
Stig Blomqvist 
Valentino Rossi 
Danny Sullivan 
Hiroki Katoh 
Tom Kristensen 
Jeremy McWilliams 
