Unfortunately, Lady Luck was not on our side for the 3rd round of Superone at Whilton Mill Kart Club…
Theo started off well enough, being in the fastest 3 all day during practice on Friday, whether raining or dry, but Saturday didn’t get off to a great start. With bad track positioning during qualifying, Theo had to work his way through heavy traffic, but was still doing well sitting in 2nd position until he was balked on his next flying lap and then it started to rain (so no one improved further). Therefore, even though he qualified 5th in his group, this meant he qualified 13th overall once the times were merged.
This gave Theo some extra work to do in the heats. Starting from 9th in both of them, he drove well to finish 6th in his first heat (setting fastest lap of the day!), and 3rd in his second. This meant he finished the day 5th overall.
On Sunday, starting Final 1 in 5th, Theo didn’t have the best of starts so dropped down to 7th, but as the race unfolded he got involved in a great 4-way battle for 3rd (and in the process set 2nd fastest lap of the whole weekend). However, a failed move on the last lap for 4th meant he had to settle for 6th.
Starting Final 2 in 6th, again Theo didn’t get off to the greatest of starts, hampered also by a setup that would take some time to come on. By lap 2 he had dropped down to 14th! However, as the kart “came alive”, Theo started working through the pack and was soon up to 7th and setting purple sectors all the way, with a rolling lap that was 0.4s fastest than anyone else on track! But this is where Lady Luck was once again not on his side… just as he moved into 7th and was closing down on the leaders very fast, an incident triggered a Red Flag. The subsequent rolling back of a lap not only meant that he was again demoted to 9th (as people involved in the incident were re-instated!), but since the final result was then declared despite being only half distance, he did not have the chance to make that stunning pace work for him and earn the result he truly deserved.
But looking at the positives:
1) Theo was once again one of the fastest 3 on track all weekend – not a bad achievement for one of only a handful of Privateers, fighting against big teams and even bigger budgets!
2) Theo finally won a trophy at Superone, for Top Privateer!
3) Theo scored the 6th highest points for the whole weekend
4) Theo still lies in 9th in the Championship, but has closed the gap to some key rivals.
A huge thanks to Roger @ RPM for saying some really nice things to Theo, which gave him a lot of encouragement. Thanks also to both Luke Hines & James Bean (and all at ZipKart) for their encouragement too, and to our sponsors MNP Building Services for all their support.
It was great to see Billy Monger at the track too (get in there Billy!)! Again, Theo couldn’t get the result to dedicate to you, but he’ll keep trying!
Looking forward now to Round 4 of Superone…