Racereport SKCC 1 Kristianstad

First SKCC competition of the year, now in a new class for the entire season. Exciting and of course a little nervous feelings for all of us. Nice weather as well and we are generally happy with the weekend. We ended up in the top half of the largest starting field we have ever started in, P20 out of 53 entrants.

This time we started training already on Thursday since it was a public holiday in Sweden. Old tyres and slightly slippery track made us hope for more. We fitted our new training tyres already on the last outing on thursday to see if it made any difference, and it definitely did! -1.2 seconds! The self esteem was back and we felt confident that we could improve from here.

Friday morning and run-in of the #1 engine. Felt great, but we were not allowed to push fully until the second outing. Engine suddenly didn't deliver but we found the cause and corrected it. We were not super competitive anymore but with some small changes we kept improving until the last outing.

The first and only official training was ok, but the kart felt loose and Tuva couldn't really push. 10 laps and continously improving was great and since the night was quite cold we hope for some more grip in the track until time trials. New tyres will surely help as well.

Slightly warmer, new tyres and a driver fully focused. This could only be better! Tuva chose to leave the pit a bit after the others wich helped her a lot in the beginning. She lost the rear slightly going out on the main straight on lap 3 wich was a bit costly, but she kept on improving lap by lap. Lap 6 she had to abandon because of traffic and lap 7 was unfortunately ruined by yellow flags. It was really close and Tuva felt she could have improved even more but we were happy with new PB and a P12.

Starting P15 was pretty ok considering the large number of participants. The start was ok but lost a few places already on the first lap before the tyres was up to temp. She gained the places back before the race was over and with a little help from penalty from other driver. Slightly slower, probably due to the increase of griplevel and temperature.

The start was better and she kept her position a little longer until she lost a few places on lap 4. The kart felt loose this time and she couldn't really push wich meant she was unable to pass even though she was close to the karts in front of her. We used high tyre pressure but the best times were in the last laps anyway. Maybe we should aim slightly higher?

Small adjustments to the kart but we didn't dare to raise the tyre pressure any more. Starting P11 this time (only half of the field compared to the heats where 2/3 of the field was running) and she made a decent take off. However on the second lap when she had just passed a driver she was helped out on the grass with some damage to the kart. Thankfully she wasn't hurt. This part of the track is the fastest with top speeds closing in on 120 km/h!

Due to the DNF in the superheat we were demoted to start from P27. Since the master started to accelerate way too early there was a large gap between Tuva and the next kart. Really dangerous since that will allow the back of the grid higher speed in to turn one and two and we hope the competition management will judge harder on this in the future for everyones safety. Tuva made the best of her position and speed and gained 7 positions before the end of the race. All in all a decent race but with some luck we could have ended a bit higher up the order. We know what we need to practice on and hopefully the coming races will be a bit different.

A huge thank you to EKS and Erik Magnussen who is helping us a lot. Also a thank you to Thomas Andersson (TAR) who helped us with our race engine. And lastly a big thanks to Kristianstad Kartingklubb who managed a great competition with an unusually high number of participants.