At our last Lydd visit, the TEC-MEC chassis seemed to reach a performance level and no matter how hard David Klaassen tried, he struggled to get Mike on to the front runners pace. In the final the Stub axle snapped so Mike was unable to gain many points and slid down to 13th in the National championships. He didn't want a repeat of that in Motors, so having seen how quick the JKH chassis were at the track, he borrowed a two year old one for the weekend. The weather would be very hot, but as the track had been flooded until Thursday, and then had Vega rubber on it, it was running about half a second slower than the TKM Super 1.
On Friday, he was on a par with Martyn Lyell, who currently leads the series. Martin is on a 2007 works chassis, so the team were pleased that he was instantly on the pace with the JKH. 'Ginge' from JKH said that the new chassis was at least 2/10ths quicker here and at some tracks almost 4/10ths faster than the 2005/6 model Mike was on.
On the Saturday practice, most were on new tyres, and again Mike was within a few hundreths of Lyell and Super 1 front runner Tucker, so in official qualifying it was a rewarding 3rd quickest. Starting towards the back of the grid(in this championship the fastest start at the back, but get more points for being quickest) Mike tried to keep with Lyell and Tucker, but as they slipped through the traffic, Mike was baulked by a couple of slower drivers. He eventually caught them and overtook them only to get blocked and taken out. Eventually he recovered and came in 7th out of 21 runners, saying that just 12 laps were not enough. With Lyell and Tucker, Mike was the only driver to get below 41 seconds.
On Sunday Martin Lyall was again the quickest although both David Klaassen and Martyn's dad had Mike a fraction quicker, but the official results placed the top 6 within a few hundreths. Mike could so easily have been 2nd, but recorded a 5th fastest time! Again starting from almost the last row, he was shunted down to last, but this time once the first lap had passed, he progressed steadily to gain 5th, with Lyell and Tucker just ahead. Fortunately for Mike, on both days he was faster and finished higher than current Super 1 leader Luke Caudle, who started the meeting in second and Stephen Napier who was in third place.
In the Sunday final Luke Caudle was originally black flagged and excluded for contact driving, but was included in the final places in 7th as the wrong flag was shown. It should have been the black and white warning flag, not the full black. So after all the video evidence etc, we believe that Martin Lyell now leads the championship by about 30 points from Tucker, with Mike Luke and Stephen all fighting over third place. Both Reed and MaCaulay are close enough to the top five to have an affect on the overall positions, but with just two rounds to go all Lyell has to do is to be quick and near the front on Saturday and the championship could be his.
Mike and Martin were joint points leaders after the first two rounds, but since then Martyn has driven consistently well and deserves it, while Mike had a poor couple of rounds at Rowrah and dropped about 30 points to Martyn in that weekend alone. That may well be the margin of difference when they race for the last time at Houton Park in October.
Another excellent meeting - well done to the PSC Production team for organising the event and to the scrutineers for catching out some more cheats trying to win by default. I get my information second-hand, so please check http://www.kartingtv.tv/ for more information and s the official results and tables. Next week Mike drives for England, and although he is booked to drive the TEC-MEC, I think he will be asked by Paul his team manager, to drive the JKH as it has a proven track record at Warden Law. Mike with be joined by Luke Caudle, Will Reed and Will Waterman. It is a first cap for both Caudle and Reed, but Waterman was in the Junior team with Mike last year and team race d well with Mike to help England to victory. Hopefully the Weather will be kind to us.
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