U.S. Team Lights Up All-Star Race ; Robby Gordon brings fire to a friendly season-ender.(Brief Article)

For 14 years, the Race of Champions has brought together the best world rally drivers, with several championship-winning guests invited from other classes of motorsports, including motorcycling. Remember the Battle of the Network Stars? Well, the ROC is similar- except all the competitors are real racers, none of them has ever appeared in either a Love Boat or Baywatch episode, and the event is held on a small Spanish-speaking island off the west coast of Africa.

These stars, normally hounded and handled everywhere they go in the regular season, are completely at ease here in the Canary Islands in December, away from the adoring crowds on the mainland and with their 2001 campaigns concluded. You can ask them a question and get an honest answer free of the requisite long-winded, sponsor-thanking preamble. This one is just for fun.

Then there's Robby Gordon and Shaun Palmer. These two ROC virgins brought more excitement to the occasion than it's ever seen before. More on that later.

The ROC employs a best-two-out-of-three elimination to decide the top national team in the Nations Cup on Saturday and two individual finalists to compete for the Champion of Champions on Sunday.

Circuito Islas Canarias is a 1.62-mile two-lane loop with an over-under crossover about two-thirds of the way through. It's all dirt apart from a quarter mile of tarmac when passing through the start/finish arch. Used unfortunately only during the semifinals and finals, there's a splash-and-launch section. In racing terms, the course is part Colin McRae Rally video game, part Mickey Thompson-style off-road stadium racing.

By the end of the event, cars are held together only by liberal use of colored tape. Three vehicles most flogged around the course in head-to-head heats were 1100-cc Honda CBR-powered autocross buggies from Fast & Speed in Holland, three Mitsubishi Evo VI Group N rally cars, and (with SEAT no longer running a world rally team) the explosive SEAT Cordoba WRC E3 cars. An impressive curveball came in the form of Per Eklund's trio of 580-horsepower Saab 9-3 Turbo 4x4s, one of which sans restrictor plate (i.e. a 750-hp four-cylinder) took the Open Class and second overall at Pikes Peak in 2000 with Eklund at the wheel.

You'd think the rally drivers would have a cakewalk here against nonrallyists. Colin's little brother Alister McRae, 2000 WRC champ Marcus Gronholm and seven-time Spanish rally champ Jesus Puras were all present, among many others. Four-time WRC champ Tommi Makinen had to cancel due to a compressed vertebra thanks to a spectacular rollover in the guardrail-free Corsica rally in mid-October. And this year's champ Richard Burns, sponsored by Pirelli, wasn't going to show up at a non-vital Michelin event.