Working men beat the students
July 2010 |
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Back to the action and it was JWM who found themselves on pole. Not only that but they seemed in a league of their own ahead of their rivals. Teamcraft were second with other championship hopefuls InkJet and Loose Heads third and fourth. HB Racing were having a better day in fifth. Certainly better than Es Car Go down in 25th and Team Awesome who were looking more like Team Average starting at the back of the grid after changing kart after qualifying.
Paul Jennings was setting his sights high for the forthcoming race and felt confident of victory.
“Hopefully I can just go on from here and try to keep up with some of the Premier lads and forget that I’m actually in a Clubman race. I think we’ve got the pace to do it today.”
Melly Smith, who was sporting a funky new hair-do for this race, was enjoying the track although her 4 Roads team were not as quick as they would have liked as her team-mates explained.
“It’s not very good. We are four or five tenths of yesterday’s time when I was testing so it was pretty poor really. We had the brakes bled in practice and then I went out with the pedals too far forward. I’m not going to use that as an excuse though.”
JWM fairly streaked away off the line, despite finding themselves on the wrong side of the sausage at the start. Further back a battle was brewing between Teamcraft, InkJet, Loose Heads and the Ginsters who had come up well from the middle of the pack. These four led a big train of karts that also included The Stallions, British Columbia, Mobile Chicane and Auditing Armageddon. The Man’s An Animal had an extremely fast and well-drilled first lap pit stop highlighted by some over-exuberant celebratory man-love from the team after pushing their man back out.
The first round of pit stops spread the field up and as the race progressed the student team aka The Man’s an Animal started working their way up the pecking order. In fact by half distance they were leading although the pit stops would play a part over the second half of the race. As with the previous race, the team revealed their performance was largely down to a hearty consumption of Biere des Moulins the night before. Duffle coat wearing, Ganja smoking student number 2 gave his views on events.
“We got really, really drunk again last night and I didn’t score with any Welsh birds so I thought I’d try and score on the track instead. It is going well out there at the moment and we are running second. Hopefully we can get psyched and get the win.”
With the leading teams established as JWM, The Students and InkJet, it looked like the final places would be fought between the Ginsters, Loose Heads, Five Gloves and Es Car Go, who had made solid progress during the race. Geoff Symonds gave his views on Es Car Go’s day.
“We didn’t have a very good qualifying because the exhaust came off. We decided to do an early stop and that got us up to fourth, which is good. Mark [Oliver] went out and got involved with an incident when two karts touched in front and he somehow got a penalty for it so not best pleased really.”
Jon Wort was missing from Loose Heads this weekend and the team had drafted in Lightweight Sprint new boy Francesco Volpe.
“I thought I’d step up to the plate and help out these guys in their hour of need. I was feeling a bit of pressure coming into the weekend because they are doing well in the championship but we are doing alright so far. I’m there or there about in terms of pace; doing the test session yesterday helped. I just hope I don’t let the team down.”
Two teams having a nightmare were Team Awesome and The Stallions. The only thing remotely awesome about Team Awesome was their awesomely bad luck! A number of kart changes during the race left them trailing. Sami Seppala seemed resigned to another bad result.
“I don’t know where to start. The kart if four-stroking and we are about two seconds off the pace. Jimsey stopped to complain about the kart and that cost us time so we are going to see if the guys can do something in the fuel stop. We changed the kart after practice and opted to start from the back as well so it’s been a tough day”
They eventually did get the kart tested and the test driver didn’t even make it out of the pit lane before turning around and declaring it broken.
The Stallions’ day was effectively ended when Spiros Christoffoffunspellableson decided to drive into the pit wall and break one of JV’s nice Birel karts. This left them trailing near the back of the field and unlikely to challenge for decent points.
After such a promising qualifying performance, Teamcraft’s day ended in bitter disappointment when their chain broke. Losing several laps in the pits getting it fixed, they stood little chance of scoring any significant points.
Back at the front and it was an easy lights to flag win from JWM with The Students coming home in second some way behind. InkJet scored another third place. Solid results from both Loose Heads and Es Car Go kept them at the top of the standings.
“I think we just capitalised on a really fast kart. Paul qualified well and was just dialled in today. The kart was brilliant and we just got on with it. We were getting a bit worried towards the end because the chain was making a bit of a funny noise but apart from that there were no real problems. We overtook the students in the last stint at the hairpin so they certainly gave us a bit of a concern but at the end of the day the tax payers won.”
With the championship battle still wide open as we enter the halfway point in the championship, it is all to play for at Ellough Park. Can JWM win again? Can Es Car Go or Loose Heads win their first race of the year? Will the students be sober? Will Team Awesome ever stop breaking karts? The only way to find out is to be there.
