An awesome weekend at the Honda Cadet British Open Championship at Bayford Meadows this weekend! So many great things happened this weekend, and we finished the day off on a high with a well deserved 6th place overall. A great result for his first national competition, especially aged 9 in a grid of up to 13 year-olds!
We were fast from the off during practice on Saturday, but when the rain came we were WAY off the pace! Luckily, Grant from ZipKart was with us and gave us some amazing setup tips which worked fantastically as in the very next session we were fastest on track – IN THE RAIN!
This meant we started Sunday confidently, despite the rain, and Theo got off to a great start by qualifying 3rd in his group. This meant that he was to start 6th for both pre finals. In the 1st Pre Final, he didn’t get off to a great start and had some issues with power during the race, but he managed to bring the kart home in 8th.
In the 2nd Pre Final, Theo again didn’t get a great start, but he battled through strongly to finish 4th.
This meant that he started the Grand Final in 8th. Again, a slow start (we need a different clutch) meant that he dropped down to 10th in the opening laps, but as the race went on Theo lit up and carved his way up to 6th, setting 2nd fastest lap of the day in the process. With 2 laps to go he got involved in a 3-way dice for 4th, and just after the start of the last lap Theo got into 5th again, only to get loaded into the next corner and pushed wide to drop him back into 6th where he finished.
Anyway, there are SO many positives to draw from this weekend, so we came away smiling!
A huge thanks to Simon Whitehead for running us all weekend (many MANY wise tips!), to Luke Whitehead for all the driver tuition (we see why you were so fast here now!), to Grant Munro (the genius) for all the setup advice, to Liam and Paul McNeilly for being such fantastic team mates all weekend, to Sam Webster for keeping the kids entertained so well all weekend, and lastly to Luke Hines who kept in touch with us all weekend to check on our progress and offer the usual words of wisdom.
Thanks also to Lewis Hall and Oliver Bearman of Virtus for helping us during Friday testing, where we really struggled with the kart only to find out that it was just a bad set of slicks that we’d been using for the first 2 rounds at Bayford (if only we knew that earlier!).
Finally, a huge congratulations should go out to the Virtus crew for such a dominant display all weekend. They really did deserve to win the O Plate.
Above: Watching the racing from the grid for the O Plate final
(Photos courtesy of Paul Babington Photography)