The first round of the NKC Championship kicked off this weekend at Clay Pigeon Raceway in Dorset.
This weekend was our first time competing in the NKC championship and also our first race down at Clay Pigeon Raceway. The weekend consisted of Friday & Saturday practice with a race on Saturday evening, two further races on Sunday and a grand final Sunday afternoon.
Friday testing highlighted a kart issue, it was difficult to drive and not behaving as it should. We spent the morning adjusting ride heights, widths and gearing until the kart felt good again. In each of the sessions after that we were hitting consistent times and bit by bit finding the tenths we needed to improve. The five Saturday practice sessions were much the same, tweaking tyre pressures and set-up to find as much time as we can.
Due to the large grid numbers one of our races was held on the Saturday afternoon. With our new slick tyres fitted we wen’t to the pre-grid, had our kart checked and was ready to go. NKC has random grids so there was no qualifying. We were starting on the 3rd row of the grid in 5th position.
The start went well and by the horse-shoe we were running in 4th position. The race was very competitive and we were competing against some big teams and local drivers who know the circuit inside out. We pushed on and ended in 13th place our of 30 drivers.
Race two we were starting in 17th, we made a good start, raced hard, held our own and made up places throughout the race to finish race two in 11th.
Our final race of the day before being placed into one of the three finals (A, B or C), we were starting 24th on the grid. Again kept out of trouble at the start and raced hard with the pack around us. We made up a lot of positions, making it up to our final finishing position of 15th.
In our first three races we managed to achieve 111pts this was enough to make it to the A-Final which was a great achievement in our first race. Our starting position was 26th.
There was a false start to the final so after two formation laps we got racing, we raced hard with four other drivers around us, constantly swapping places, and although this made for exciting racing the problem was we were all losing too much time to the pack ahead and by the time we got past them the gap was too big to make up any more places. We raced hard and made up a few positions to finish the race in 24th, unfortunately we received a drop-nose penalty so were classified 25th.
To finish 24 out of 74 drivers in our first competition race in the NKC was a great achievement. We will be pushing hard to do even better in the next round which is being held at Forest Edge.
A big thank you to the organisers of the NKC. They couldn’t have run the weekend any better.
You can watch the streams of all the weekends racing on the Karting Live YouTube channel by clicking here.
To find out more about the NKC and to view race results and championship standings click here.
For our most recent images taken throughout the weekend please view our gallery.
To read more news articles please visit our news archive.
