Saturday was overcast, but having seen Ash in practice on Friday, he looked to be about 2/10th's off the quickest, which indicated a top ten finish was possible provided Ash kept the Kart on the track and nothing fell off. With a field of 50 top young drivers the heats almost went to plan. Heat 1: 10th to 6th - 4 place gain and a good start to the meeting.
There were 6 heats, but Ash was next out in heat 4, missing heats 2 & 3, so a long wait of several hours. Ash was 6th on the grid and as you can see from the chart, drove through to record his first Stars heat win in only his second Stars race - impressive. Matt Parry his Ultimate team mate drove well from 14th on the grid to make it a 1-2 for the team.
Had Ash been able to count Heat 5, he would have been near the front of the grid for the final, but even with his penalty, he still managed to make the 'A' final, leaving a further 24 drivers to battle out places in the 'B' final. Mike was confident that Ash had the pace to win a 'B' final, but better to get straight into the 'A'. Mike was hoping for a 10 place gain, getting Ash to 14th and at the end of his first Stars final Ash managed 17th - gaining 6 places, and effectively beating over 30 drivers. 
Ash then competed in heat 5 and was allowed to miss heat 6. This time he had his worst grid position at 22nd and over the course of the race managed to get to 6th before Jordan King just passed him on the 10th and final lap. Sadly Ash had missed seeing a yellow flag during his push and received a warning from the clerk and was subsequently disqualified from the heat and given a 4 point endorsement .
This is a graph showing the fastest laps for the top drivers, and on this evidence Ash was the 14th quickest 3/10th of a second off the pace of the quickest. He needed to be a 1/10th quick to break into the top 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment