It’s the final round of the 2024 NKC championship and our last round in the Junior Rotax category. The weekend had some high’s and low’s and learn’t a lot. We didn’t get the results we were hoping for but can take away from the weekend that we were on pace.
Another weekend racing and after a long drive we are at Warden Law for the final round of the NKC 2024 championship. The weekend consisted of the usual Friday & Saturday practice and a Sunday race day.
Warden Law is new to us so testing was essential, throughout Friday and Saturday we tested everything until we found a good set-up that worked well to gave Jacob the confidence he needs in his kart to go head to head. In each of the sessions we were improving lap time and when the timing transponders were on we were running top 5 in all our sessions.
As I’m sure you know by now, NKC has random grids so there is no qualifying, we are randomly given our grid spaces, the final is determined by the points you’ve scored in the heat races. We headed to the pre-grid for our first race starting in 15 position.
Race one started 15th and was hoping for a good result but it all went pear shape at the start. I got pushed to the edge of the circuit and managed to just stay off the wet grass when the kart in-front of me spun and almost took me out. I had nowhere to go as I couldn’t take to the grass because it was wet. I lost a lot of places and ended up finishing in 21st position.
Race two was our chance to make up for the first race, we had a starting position of 5th so was hoping for a good result, especially as we know we have the pace. The warm up lap was far to slow and many karts bogged down as the lights went out, including ours, the bad luck didn’t stop there, as I approached the first corner my righthand wheels hit a damp patch and when I got to the corner I couldn’t turn, as I understeer onto the grass I watch the grid zooming past me. I got back on track in pretty much last place and started picking up as many places as I could. I ended the race in 20th position.
Race three is our back of grid start so I knew I couldn’t go backwards too far, we started this final race in 24th position. Made a good start and raced hard picking up places lap by lap. Finishing the race in 17th…. an improvement on the last two races but still not where we should have been.
Final… I don’t know how but I managed to make it trough to the A-Final which means I have a clean-sweep of 6 out of 6 A-Final results, which is amazing considering we haven’t raced in grids this big before this season nor have we raced at any of the tracks we visited. We started the final in 29th, made a good start and raced hard making up 7 places to finish in 22nd.
We scored a total of 148 points this weekend and are now 19th in the championship out of 97 drivers.
It’s been an amazing year, learn’t alot, raced hard made every A final and won a race and was classified as 3rd in the privateer championship, so all in all a good first year at the NKC.
We are looking forward to returning next year to compete as a senior with our new engine partner and new kart…. more information coming soon.
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