Nigel Lamb of Great Britain won the 2014 Red Bull Air Race World Championship on Oct. 26 in the first annual running of the race after a three-year break called to reorganize the competition.
Lamb’s finish in second place behind Nicolas Ivanoff of France in the concluding race of the eight-race competition gave him enough total points to capture the full-season victory. Adding scoreboard pressure to the final race, held in Spielberg, Austria, was the possibility that the championship could have gone to Austrian pilot Hannes Arch, had Arch won the final race of the circuit that began in March, in Dubai.
Arch finished "a disappointing fourth" in the race held in the alpine setting of Spielberg, despite dominating the pre-race training sessions and demonstrating "blazing speed in Saturday's Qualifying at the picturesque Red Bull Ring track, which was surrounded by snow-capped mountains," said the racing organization in a news release.
"It's just amazing," said the champion, Lamb, who had won the third race of the season, in Malaysia, and followed up that triumph with five straight second-place finishes to overtake rivals Arch and Paul Bonhomme, winner of the first race of 2014. "I feel very lucky because I didn't think that my time was even good enough to get on the podium. It's an amazing feeling. It's a great day. It's an indescribable feeling."
Previously, Lamb’s best Red Bull finish was a third-place showing, in 2010.
By earning nine points for his Austria finish, Lamb captured the 2014 championship in his single-seat MXS-R racer with a season total of 62 points, followed by Arch, with 53; Bonhomme, of Great Britain, 51; Ivanoff, 42; Pete McLeod of Canada, 38; Matt Hall of Australia, 33; Matthias Dolderer of Germany, 21; Martin Sonka of the Czech Republic, 18; Yoshihide Muroya of Japan, 10; Kirby Chambliss of the U.S., 7; Peter Besenyei of Hungary, 6; and Michael Goulian of the U.S., 3.
