A cold night at Wembley, the flood-lights beaming down on an emotional crowd – and the Germans win. It is a familiar theme for generations of football fans, except that this was another wipeout delivered by that serial winner of the racetrack, Michael Schumacher, at the Race of Champions, a unique motor racing event that brought together some of the biggest names from Formula One and rallying under the roof of the new Wembley Stadium.

The now not-so-hallowed turf was covered with 1,800 tonnes of Tarmac so that Schumacher could compete against old rivals, such as Jenson Button and David Coulthard, and new ones such as Marcus Grönholm, twice the world rally champion, and Andy Priaulx, the Guernsey-born three-time world touring car champion.

Instead of the green expanse of Wembley turf – or the quagmire as it infamously became during England’s disastrous Euro 2008 qualifier against Croatia – there was a tight and twisty circuit laid out in front of an enthusiastic crowd of almost 50,000 people.

Motor racing fans complain that they have no idea who is the best driver in the world because they each compete in different cars. Which is where the Race of Champions came in last night, pitting 16 selected top drivers against each other in the same cars, including a snorting British-made Aston Martin and the equally British-made Ford Focus world rally car.

The fans only discovered something that they probably already knew: that Schumacher, seven times the Formula One world champion, is good at driving pretty much anything; a race in milk floats would be up his street. First, Schumacher partnered Sebas-tian Vettel, the Scuderia Toro Rosso Formula One driver, in a German team to win the Race of Champions Nations Cup, defeating Button, who had been teamed with Priaulx for England, on the way.

Then, in the individual competition, he was poor Button’s nemesis once again, smashing the lap record several times on his way to the final. Meanwhile, Priaulx spun out of his semi-final against Mattias Ekström, the two-time German touring car champion. David Coulthard, representing Scotland, did not even make the semi-finals, meaning an early end for British interest in the competition.

There was good news and bad news for Schumacher, the good news being that he came within touching distance of winning the Race of Champions in a tie-break, the motoring racing equivalent of a penalty shoot-out; the bad news was that he put the ball over the bar, so to speak, when he spun within sight of the chequered flag, allowing Ekström, of Sweden, to take the title for the second consecutive year. It was small comfort for England fans, but at least this time Germany didn’t take all the prizes home from Wembley.