The 2023 Race of Champions will be a bit of a party for drivers who are two weeks removed from competing in the Dakar Rally. While former ROC winners Sébastien Loeb and Mattias Ekström will take part in the racing itself, Stéphane Peterhansel will be there to put on an exhibition with his Audi RS Q e-tron E2.
The Audi RS Q e-tron E2 is Team Audi Sport’s newest rally raid challenger, intended to be a slimmer and more powerful iteration than its predecessor and capable of racing for the World Rally-Raid Championship in the T1.U category. Its début at the Rallye du Maroc in October proved to be a hit as Carlos Sainz, racing in the Open class as the car did not meet 2022 T1 regulations, recorded an overall time faster than the T1 entries.
Unfortunately for the team, the 2023 Dakar Rally went disastrously as Peterhansel and Sainz retired from crashes; the two wrecked together in Stage #6, resulting in Peterhansel’s co-driver Édouard Boulanger breaking his vertebrae, before Sainz suffered the same injuries in another accident three legs later. Perhaps adding insult to injury, team was also marred by controversy prior to Stage #5 when they received an eight-kW power boost as part of the FIA’s Equivalence of Technology rule which allows race officials to modify T1.U and T1+ entries’ speeds to level the playing field, sparking outcry from Nasser Al-Attiyah who went on to win the Rally anyway. Ekström was the lone Audi to reach the finish in fourteenth overall.
Sweden’s snow and ice will be a change of pace for the E2, which had only seen action in desert environments. To “prepare” the Audi for such a climate, Ekström showcased it at the FIS World Cup’s Hahnenkamm-Rennen Kitzbühel in Kitzbühel, Austria, over the weekend.
“It’s fantastic that Stéphane Peterhansel will lap in our Audi RS Q e-tron Dakar car too,” said Ekström, a three-time ROC champion set to race for Team Sweden. “The car has only rarely been seen in Europe as we usually run in the desert in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, so it will be great for the fans to come close and realise what it’s all about.”
Ekström will also have a demonstration of his own in the Audi S1. Loeb, the runner-up to Al-Attiyah, will seek to defend his title and claim a record fifth ROC victory for Team France.
Peterhansel, a fourteen-time Dakar Rally winner, competed in ROC in 2005 and 2006 for France like Loeb, albeit in a different French team. He was knocked out by Marcus Grönholm in the 2005 rally quarter-final but reached the Nations Cup final alongside Sébastien Bourdais where they lost to Ekström and Team Scandinavia. Bourdais and Loeb then defeated Peterhansel and Yvan Muller in the 2006 Nations Cup and Peterhansel lost to USA’s Travis Pastrana in the individual tournament’s rally quarter-final. Incidentally, Ekström beat Loeb in the 2006 individual final in a battle of future Dakar rivals.
ROC will take place on 28/29 January, a month before the next W2RC round in Abu Dhabi. Peterhansel won the 2022 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in the first RS Q e-tron, becoming the first rally raid overall winner in an electric vehicle
