We headed south to Winchester for the first round of the 2025 NKC Championship at Forest Edge Race Circuit. This is our second season competing in the NKC however this season we are racing in the Senior Rotax category, which has the biggest grid of nearly 90 drivers.
The race weekend is run over three days, Friday & Saturday practice, a race on Saturday evening, two further races on Sunday followed by a final Sunday afternoon.
The conditions for the weekend were perfect, sunny and hot all weekend with absolutely no wind so ideal for racing. The track had plenty of grip and this increased session by session throughout the weekend.
In Friday practice we had some issues, we were on-pace but were having intermittent power issues with the kart keep cutting out. This obviously was hampering our lap-times and was something that needed sorting as the kart would be un-drivable like that when competing. We changed battery, carburettor and then the wiring loom. This seemed to fix the issues and we spent the rest of the day working on set-up and tyre pressures.
Saturday practice went well and the problems from Friday hadn’t re-surfaced so we continued to work on set-up ready for our first main race later that evening. NKC have mixed grids so there is no qualifying we go straight into our first race.
Race 1 – Our starting position was 25th, we made a good start not loosing any places and then through-out the race made up positions each lap. We mad up 8 places and finished the race in 17th. That was us done for Saturday. We have the evening to prepare the kart for the morning as our second race is the first race out on Sunday morning.
Saturday night we checked over the kart, laser-aligned it, had it jigged and set it up ready for race 2 Sunday morning.
Race 2 – Our starting position was 1st, we made another good start and gained an initial lead in the first few corners, the second place driver was right on our rear bumper before the end of the lap and made his move, we tried to un-cut him in the next corner and with cold tyres unfortunately skidded into the back of him sending us onto the grass, by the time we were back on track we had dropped to 8th. We pushed hard to try and make up the places. It’s a very competitive grid and we only managed to make up one place to finish on track in 7th. However we had a dropped nose penalty adding 5 seconds to our time and dropped us to 12th for the final classification.
Race 3 – Our starting position for our final heat race was 21st. We made a good start not loosing any places and overall made up a couple of places but for some reason we had lost engine power and although we managed to hold off the drivers behind we didn’t have enough power to make up any further places. The pace was dropping off lap by lap and on the slow-down lap our engine blew-up leaving Jacob to push it back into the pits at the end of the race.
We use Wright Racing engines and they came over to us in the paddock to see what assistance they could provide. They soon diagnosed that the piston had blown. I stripped off the engine and they very kindly lent us another one to compete in the final.
Final – Replacement engine is fitted and running however we can’t test it on track so head off to the final to see if we can rescue our weekend. Unfortunately things go from bad to worse and on the warm-up lap Jacob has to pull off as we lost all power. This is our first DNF in a year and a half, resulting in no points for the final. The failure was caused by an error in the installation of the engine, so avoidable and very frustrating. I am very sorry for letting Jacob down and will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
It’s been a difficult weekend and a lot of lessons were learn’t. We will come back stronger next month when we head up to Grantham for round 2 at Fulbeck Kart Circuit.
