ECKC Round 3
With 8 races of my season complete, it is time for another update. Last weekend was a long drive up to Mirabel for ICAR. In a few words, it was a weekend to forget. It was the first time I have been on the ICAR track so I had to learn the track during Friday practice for the feature races on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I didn’t do so well. I qualified 25th, but was doing better in the pre-final (got up to 13th) but I hit a curb a little too hard and went flying into the tire barrier, bending and breaking a lot of parts. Miracle work from my mechanic/driver coach, Curtis, and the whole SH team got my kart ready to go for the final. Luck however was not on my side, as my kart wouldn’t start when it was time for the race, apparently the battery was broken and with the quiet rule in effect we couldn’t test it to make sure it would start before we reached the grid. That left me with nothing to show but a lot of broken parts and a DNS.
The Sunday is what really mattered, as it was an ECKC race, versus the Saturday, which was a Coupe de Quebec race, a series that I am not running in for points. I qualified a bit better on Sunday with a 22nd. I made my way to 18th in the pre-final, which was where I would be starting the final. The final was looking good for about 3 seconds, until the middle of corner one. A window I saw to avoid carnage in front of me narrowed before I could get all the way through it, and I got collected from behind, ending up with my side pod sitting on top of another drivers front wheel. I pulled myself off the other kart and managed to get going again, but something was wrong with the kart forcing me to retire on lap 3. After the race we figured out that when I got on tangled up in turn one, my fuel line was pinched so very little gasoline was getting to the engine and giving me no power! A DNF was not how I wanted to finish the weekend, but there was nothing I could do.
Sunday it was time for a Mosport club race. It appeared that Mother Nature would be the deciding factor. It was dry for practice and qualifying, where it showed that I was fast. Even though I qualified in 6th I was only 0.007 off of 4th place! It was really, really close. In the pre-final I got up to 3rd, but contact from behind (isn’t it always?) sent me all the way down the pack, and from there, damage from the contact resulted with a disappointing meatball flag. In the end, I ended up 19th. Weather was now starting to become a major factor. There were some sprinkles out in the pre-final, but before the race it was starting to pour. Having not declared it a wet race, we were forced to go out on dry tires, even though it was really slippery. On the warm-up lap I learned the hard way as I went off track, and even drove over a pylon! After ripping it out from under the chassis (which I’ve been told looked rather humorous) I got back into place ready to start the race. The first corner was finally not so bad, we managed it without contact, since everybody was cautious due to the rain. For a while the weather seemed to cooperate since it was starting to dry up. While it was doing that, I was making up a lot of positions. Then it started to rain again and staying on track became harder and harder to do on slicks. I was still making up positions, but then a red flag was called due to an incident on track. When the red flag was called I was up to 6th position, but because of the red flag the officials determined the final results from one full lap prior to the red flag being thrown placing me back down in 9th.