Coulthard: RoC battle wide open

Despite the narrow and slow nature of the track, Coulthard points to Heikki Kovalainen's success in last year's event as the reason why 'racers' should go into the knock-out competition with hope.

One 'racer' and one 'rallier' will face off in a best of three superfinal at the Stade de France event to decide this year's Race of Champions winner.

GP2 racer Kovalainen defeated last year's rally finalist Sebastien Loeb in the superfinal to take the crown.

"It's fairly obvious that the drivers who spend their times sliding going sideways should be better at this sort of discipline but the nature of this sort of course is slow and it levels things out," Coulthard said.

"If we had to slide a car at 100mph through a forest we wouldn't do it - we would crash. But the track does make it a lot more even and Heikki won the event last year and as far as I know he hasn't done any rallying."

Coulthard is paired with 1995 World Rally Champion Colin McRae in the Team Autosport Great Britain for the Nations Cup part of the event, and joked that the UK was in fact represented by an all-Scottish line-up: "I think they were trying to see if Jenson would do it so we could have a Scottish team and an English team, but he was busy so we are representing the UK.

"If we win we will be embraced by England and if we lose then we will be the Scottish team for sure. But we are used to that."