The Race of Champions competition itself is a head-to-head tournament where the world’s best motorsport stars battle to prove that they’re the fastest on earth.
Through a series of head-to-head races in identical cars on a parallel track, one winner comes through as the fastest and is declared “The Champion of Champions.” Cars are swapped round between heats, to ensure that all drivers have to prove themselves in a variety of machinery.
For 2009, the format for The Race of Champions was changed to maximise the entertainment value for fans, who saw more action than ever before from every driver.
As in previous years, drivers competed in head-to-head heats in identical cars, with each heat held over two full laps of the parallel track.
Instead of using a knockout system from the start, the event began with a group stage, where each racer in a group raced against every other driver, and those with the most wins moved on to the next stage – the quarter-finals.
Here it became a head-to-head, no second chances, knockout competition to get to the semi-finals and then the final, where the two finalists took part in a best-of-three fight to claim the title “The Champion of Champions”.
In 2009, Mattias Ekstrom met Michael Schumacher in the final, repeating their battle from 2007. It was Ekstrom who came out on top to claim his third Champion of Champions title, winning as he did in the Stade de Frace in 2006 and Wembley in 2007.