The winner of the European Rally Championship competition in Rome was the local Giandomenico Basso in his Škoda Fabia RS Rally2. The triumph came after an intense battle with other drivers with Škoda cars. They took the first four places in the competition, with a total of seven drivers finishing in the top ten.
The Italian segment of the FIA European Rally Championship (ERC) brought dramatic battles, in which the Italian drivers starting with Škoda cars played the main roles. Four drivers with Czech cars finished in the top five, three of them of Italian nationality. The dominance of the Italian drivers was only broken by the Polish crew Miko Marczyk/Szymon Gospodarczyk in third place.
However, all of the frontrunners fought for the victory until the very finish. Between the first and the sixth in the overall rally standings was a difference of only 16.1 seconds, only the seventh driver followed with another gap of almost 19 seconds.
Giandomenico Basso and co-driver Lorenzo Granaio were in the leading group from the start of the event, but Pole Marczyk started the best on Saturday, who was in the lead in the first two stages on Saturday. Three Italian drivers, including Basso, got ahead of him right in the next stage. Until the end of Saturday's programme, the drivers were literally jostling for tenths of a second and at the end of the day the difference between the top five drivers was just 15 seconds.
In the second test on Sunday, Basso took the lead in the current standings and was briefly overtaken by his compatriot Gruncola, who then received a penalty and Basso did not let anyone else into the lead. That didn't mean he didn't have to fight, because his rivals were constantly pushing him, trying to close the slight lead, which stood at 9.5 seconds after the 11th stage.
The most intense pressure was exerted by the two pilots who are fighting for the ERC championship title this year: the aforementioned Pole Marczyk and the Italian pilot Andrea Mabellini. Both were also fighting intensely with each other, the Polish crew in the second place after the stage 11, but the Italian duo got ahead of them in the penultimate stage. Mabellini and co-driver Virginia Lenzi then defended their second position in the final Power Stage.
Basso thus won by 3.7 seconds ahead of Mabellini, with Marczyk finishing the third and missing the second place by the same margin. The Italian duo of Roberto Daprà and Luca Guglielmetti finished fourth, their gap to the crew ahead of them was just 2.7 seconds. The first four places thus belonged to the drivers in the Škoda Fabia RS Rally 2.
The sixth, the ninth and the tenth position belonged to them as well. The sixth place was taken by the home crew Simone Campedelli and Tania Canton, the ninth place belonged to the Italian duo Boštjan Avbelj and Elia de Guio and the tenth place was taken by the Czech duo Dominik Stříteský and Ondřej Krajča.
