By heat three, it was apparant that we had the speed, it was just not usable i.e. it was on the wrong bits of the track. The kart was particularly struggling through the hairpins compared to others and was ‘bouncing’ on the back due to the amount of grip. We tried everything we could to solve the problem, but nothing was working. The remaining heats gave me enough points to start fifth for the final. I knew that I had to try to beat Rhys Jenkins to maintain my position in the championship, but this was always going to be difficult due to his speed on the day. A red flag half way through the race should have bunched the field up again, but the restart was a mess and the race became very strung out. I finished the final 6th.

When we got the kart back to the van, we found the chassis had cracked, and would need re-welding before next week. We also beleive that it’s twisted, because the front won’t line up correctly. Ok, so I’m being a bit negative, but I wanted to end the year on a high and frustratingly, we tried everything but didn’t get the results I was looking for. However, the final points didnt turn out quite so bad. I scored enough to fnish 6th in the championship, and when I look back over the year, then I’m pleased, as its a respectable number and I hope to improve on it next year! Check out the video;

I’ll leave the video to show what happens in the Final, however off camera in the hairpin, an incident smashed the radiator and meant that I was unable to continue at the speed I was before, which was so frustrating given how well we were doing. However when you look at how close the Final was it was inevitable that something was going to happen, it’s just a shame it happened to me!

The points didn’t turn out to be that bad for the round; I think we were saved by our results from the heats. It looks like for the final round at Buckmore Park at the start of October that we can hope to end the championship in 5th at best, because of the way the points are looking, but anything can happen in racing, so I’ll just push for the win and see how things look by the end.

The top speed was acheived on the back straight and was recorded at 68.9 mph, at just over 11500 rpm. It was interesting to see the raw information as often commentators, tv presenters, etc will make really high claims about the speed of junior classes reaching 70 to 80 mph, when in fact the speed you can acheive on track is nearer 60 mph on an average, twisty track.  

In terms of g-forces, the Senior TKM  Stroke runs on Maxxis Red slicks, and normally you would expect to acheive about 1.5G, however at Glan y Gors, we reached 1.81G laterally and 0.94G underbraking. I have recorded in the past around 2.3G on tracks such as Shenington however it depends on the conditions.

Hopefully that gives you a rough gauge of the performance of the kart, and the sort of forces that are exerted to it and the driver.

I started 2nd for the Final, and made a good start to secure my position out of the first corner.  We were roughly 0.1 seconds slower than Adam and over the 18 lap final, I was unable to catch him to make a move, so had to settle for a happy second. It seems the kart has not lost its speed, so things look good for the next few races. Just need to find that extra bit of speed to make it a race win. Image from UK Karting

Nevertheless, in the heats we got on well, finishing 5th, 4th and 6th respectively in the first three heats. Heat 4 didn’t go quite as well, where I finished 11th. For the Final I started 6th, and got a great start, but just struggled to hold my position, due to the straight line speed issues. I finished the final 7th.

At the end of the meeting, we sent one of the engines back to Tal-ko to be rebuilt fresh before the next Super 1 Round at Larkhall. Hopefully a rebuild will bring us back up to speed, if not then we need to do some serious testing to find out why we struggled so much. The result are online on Karting UK website here. We scored good points for the Championship, and are now joint 6th.

Heat 1 I started from last (14th), and got a good start, and worked my way through the pack quickly to pull up to 6th by the finish. On Heat 2 I started on pole and held my lead on the start and had the speed to get a gap, and take the race win.

This meant that I started on 4th for the Final, and after dropping a place on the start, I managed to work my way back through to 3rd, setting the fastest lap of the race in lap 8. Unfortunately after setting the fastest lap the kart began to grip up due to the tyre pressures being too high for the temperature. I began to lose speed and frustratingly places aswell. By the end of the race, I finished in 5th. We learnt that with this kart the tyre pressures need to be pretty low, compared to others, and hopefully we can work on this before the next time we’re out. The positive factor is that we had the speed before the kart gripped up, and we were only 0.2 seconds off the lap record.

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