Roberts Vitols Takes Supercar Win In Knockhill, Scotland

Roberts Vitols became the first driver to win two headline Supercar rounds in 2021 by winning round 4 of 5 Nations British Rallycross Championship in Knockhill circuit. While Roberts led the class in Supercar’s, his sister Laura competed in the Junior class.

Vitols with his Citroen C4 Supercar won his semi-final but lost out on pole for the Final to Ollie O’Donovan (Ford Fiesta) who won the other. On a damp track, Vitols bogged down at the start with O’Donovan losing out to Steve Hill (Mitsubishi Evo) and then taking a detour through gravel. Vitols, having managed to recover faced a clean track and drove his own race, jokered on the last lap and clinched victory nearly five seconds ahead of O’Donovan.

On Saturday, in the eight-car Supercar class, Roberts Vitols won the first qualifying race, but finished fourth in the second. The day’s format did not include any more heats, with the semi-finals immediately following. Roberts won his race, securing a front-row start in the final. A good position for the podium.

However, the start of the final began with a shock in the Latvian camp – others had already left, but Vitols still remained standing for a moment on the starting field. The car was turned off, then started, and Roberts went on the track. While the team already considered the race to be written off, young Vitols found an unprecedented sporting fury in himself. The final turned out to be exciting, as the leaders also experienced both technical problems and skids – the wet weather, something between fog and rain, played in favor of the Latvian driver. While drivers struggled on wet and very tricky condition track, Roberts showed unbalievable pace to catch up over 8 second defecit at the start to take over the lead at already penultimate lap. Even more, Vitols took a confident win with over 5 seconds gap behind. After the finish, Roberts admitted: “When I pressed swith to turn on anti-lag, I accidentally hit the ignition button. I pressed the pedals – silence, I looked at the dashboard – blank. When I understood what was happening and got the car going again, I just took off and tried to put a perfect lap after lap. Three times in one of the turns I almost flew off the track, as conditions were very tricky and slippery, but I used it to my advantage and did not back out until the finish line.”

On Saturday, Laura Vītola also competed in the Junior class. In terms of positions, the qualification turned out to be difficult, but for Vitola, who had only spent her second weekend in rallycross, the task was more to find driving speed and lap times. Her performance in this regard was progressive, which was rewarded in the final. The decisive race started quite dramatically, as the fight was stopped twice wth red flags due to crashes by her competitors. As a result, Laura took fourth place in the stage among nine competitors! A great results in so ever competitive Junior class on her only second weekend in rallycross.