This weekend we headed over to Bayford Meadows for Round 7 of the Junior Rotax Championship and the 4th and final round of the 2022 Kent Cup.
We arrived on Friday to set-up everything in the paddock ready for Saturday’s test day before Sunday’s race. The Saturday didn’t quite go to plan. Us along with lots of other drivers were struggling to find pace. The circuit was green and weather conditions were mixed so finding the right settings, jetting, tyres pressures etc was quite tricky but we kept at it. Jacob did however immediately point out that the kart didn’t feel right and was pulling. We laser aligned the steering and checked all the other elements that could be causing that and everything looked ok.
It obviously wasn’t as on the last session of the day we had a chassis failure. This really wasn’t ideal and we needed to find some solutions pretty quickly so we could action a fix plan in-time for Sundays race. A paddock friend of ours Mick, helped us out and put us in touch with the Roalf Racing Team…. they were amazing. Once I had stripped the kart they fixed it, straightened it and made it race worth again. Without their help we would have been going home, so a massive thanks goes out to Roalf Racing.
By the evening the kart was fully put together again and ready for Sundays race. Early Sunday morning we checked everything to make sure it was good to race and Jacob went out for qualifying.
The kart was working well and the best we could do for qualifying was 11th, although at one stage we were holding 4th. The day just got worse from that point on. There was a lot of contact in all the races and no matter how hard we tried we ended up getting bumped down the grid with front fairing penalties.
All in all it was one of our worst weekends since starting karting at the beginning of the year. A lot has been learn’t and it’s been very character building.
No looking back, as we look forward to putting it right at the next round. We have a few weeks off now before heading down to Lydd for the last race of the 2022 summer season.
