🇷🇴 Simone Tempestini

The most successful driver in the history of the Romanian Rally Championship, with around ten titles including a run of eight in a row — a record that makes the domestic series effectively his.

He was born in Treviso in 1994 and holds an Italian passport, but competes as a Romanian and has said he feels entirely so; his father Marco is a Romanian-Italian rally driver, and the first event was Raliul Aradului in 2011, in a ninety-horsepower Dacia Logan, before Simone held a road licence.

The international high point came in 2016, when he won the Junior World Rally Championship with the Romanian team Napoca Rally Academy, taking the WRC3 category alongside it. The prize was a WRC2 season in a Citroën DS3 R5. His maiden European Rally Championship victory waited until 2024, at Rally Hungary with co-driver Sergiu Itu.

He has driven most of the Rally2 field over the years — Fiesta, DS3, C3, i20, Fabia — and maintains that he does not much care for sealed-surface rallies, which is why he enters his home championship in a Porsche 997 GT3 RGT: by his own account, to make tarmac more interesting.