This weekend was Round 5 of the Lydd IKR Summer Rotax Championship and Round 3 of the Kent Cup.
Saturday practice went well. We spent the day working on set-up for the kart as the weather was very hot and Sundays race was going to be even hotter. We achieved all of our targets and was going into Sunday feeling positive.
We went out for our practice session on brand new tyres so took it steady to wear them in before qualifying. Qualifying went ok, I qualified 5th and the top 5 were all .2 of a second within each other.
Heat 1 I finished where I started, 5th out of 15. I did make it up to 4th but a few laps later was pushed a little wide and resulted in me losing the place. That meant I start the pre-final in 5th. The kart had pace and I stuck with the pack, went for a move that didn’t stick and lost a place so ended up finishing in 6th. On one of the laps we all crossed the line with exactly the same lap time so it shows how much we were all pushing.
Up to this point in the day there had already been a lot of crashes, the ambulance had been out more than I’ve seen it out before and there had been several re-starts of races.
It’s now I time for our final. I started 6th on the grid. Made a good start and made it up to 5th within 2 laps. Then there was a crash towards the back of the pack which resulted in another red flag and then for some unknown reason after only 4 laps our race was cancelled.
This wasn’t the result anyone wanted as it meant that after all the testing and set-up tweaks that we make ready for the final was pointless. The race was stopped just as our tyres were kicking in. It was a very disappointing day and made most of the hard work we put in pointless.
