The winner of Robot Wars has said his victory has given him “a fairy tale ending”.
Team captain Michael Oates, 19, a student at Durham University, bagged victory by the judges’ vote with machine Eruption, defeating previous champion Carbide.
The two robots also faced off in the final in the last series of the BBC Two show, when Carbide was victorious.
Oates told the Press Association: “It was quite close so we couldn’t really be confident either way.
“I was expecting to have some sort of big reaction, either elation or to break down into tears, but it was just kind of shock, I didn’t know what to do.
“It didn’t really hit me until a few days later.”
He continued: “It was kind of like a fairy tale ending because it was Eruption vs Carbide again, and because we had been put in the same heat again it was the fourth time we fought them, but we’ve had everything thrown at us and we’ve both ended up there again, I was really happy the way it all worked out.”
Oates said he would continue competing in the next series of the show, saying: “In a way this means everything but on the other hand it makes no difference to anything, I’m still just as excited about this as I was beforehand and hopefully when the BBC announce series four we will go and do that, it won’t make any difference to me really.”
He added the hardest thing about the competition had been regrouping after losing to Carbide in the last series.
He said: “There were a couple of months of depression, not in a bad way, but the robot was annihilated.
“We have been doing this for 10 years, before it came back on the telly, and we never had anything like what Carbide gave to us last time.
“We came back with just scrap and we built the robots back to the original spec. Most of the stuff is remade, they just wrecked it, there was a good three months in the winter in the cold out in the garage and late nights.
“In a way it made it even more special because we had to work so hard to get back into it this time.
“It was a lot of work but there was never any question of giving up, we were always going to rebuild it and go back again, there was no debate there.”
