and warns ‘there’s a lot more still to come!’
Jordan King looked to be unbeatable in the latest round of the 2009/10 Winter Series at PF International until the weather turned and transformed proceedings into something of a lottery – but the young Warwickshire karting star nevertheless took a whole host of positives away from the weekend, not least of which being his conviction that in terms of his new Energy chassis, there is ‘a lot more still to come’.
Having campaigned both on home turf and abroad in 2009 on a Maranello mount – “If you got it right it was really good, but it could also be hard work at times,” he mused – Jordan elected to switch to fellow Italian manufacturer Energy following a back-to-back single-day test alongside a Tony Kart, having initially held a preference for the latter.
However, the scarcity of Energy chassis’ in Britain – the Harbury ace will be the only driver in the KF2 class to run one this year – and the ease with which he acclimatised to it swung the verdict, and so he headed off to PF buoyant about his prospects.
“Over a lap the times were pretty similar between the Energy and the Tony Kart,” he reflected. “They just have different characteristics to each other. When I was on the Tony Kart I didn’t feel 100 per cent with it, but the brakes felt better on the Energy and one advantage is that very few people are racing with it in Britain. A lot of drivers are out on the Tony Kart, so you don’t really gain anything, but because the Energy is far rarer you might get more chances.
“We had been really quick at PF in the dry during testing, and when we went out in the wet on Friday and Saturday we were probably even quicker. It was still wet going into race day, so I was happy with that and feeling confident. I won the first two heats quite comfortably; the first one was pretty straightforward from pole, and in the second I pulled off some outrageous manoeuvres on the first lap from near the back of the grid, and was in the lead after just three corners...”
Indeed, with a victory margin of almost five seconds in both encounters – and easily fastest lap in the second of them – it was palpable that Jordan is already very happy in his new ‘office’, as none of his rivals could even hold a candle to the 15-year-old’s prowess.
Whilst it was undeniably an excellent start to be so quick so soon, though, a change in the climatic conditions ahead of the final suddenly injected an element of the unknown into the action. A chaotic opening lap mêlée and brief engine woes dropped Jordan from first to eighth within the space of a handful of corners – setting the scene for a memorable fightback, as he artfully compensated for a lack of power down the straights with some supremely skilled braking into the corners to gain back time.
“It dried up for the final and we didn’t quite get the kart set-up right for the conditions,” the Stuart Wright Racing (SWR) speed demon confessed. “The jetting was a bit out, the front brakes needed bleeding, the motor wasn’t quite on-song either...it was little bits here and there that just added up. I knew the change in the weather would throw things up in the air a bit more, because we had only been out on the Energy for one day in the dry beforehand, so it was all still a bit of a guessing game.
“There was then carnage at the start, and Ollie Morris-Jones just got lucky and was able to establish a massive gap whilst everybody else was tripping over each other. If it hadn’t been for that, I think we would have been in with a much greater chance of winning – and if it had still been wet we could definitely have won. In the dry, I didn’t know what my absolute raw pace was or where my limits were. We didn’t quite have the same edge as in the wet, simply because we’d had far less prior track time in the dry.”
That, assuredly, is something that can be rectified with more time in the saddle, and the fact that Jordan was barely two hundredths of a second shy of the fastest lap at the close – despite all of his issues – is encouraging indeed, although perhaps somewhat less so for his rivals.
What’s more, his pace was a full three tenths quicker than that of the race-winner, meaning that with only one Winter Series outing now remaining to decide the destiny of the prestigious and coveted ‘O’ Plate laurels – and Jordan embroiled in a fierce three-way scrap for glory – the Repton School pupil might still be on a learning curve with his new chassis, but more importantly, there is clearly so much promise and potential yet to be untapped.
“I was quite pleased with how it went overall,” he concluded, having narrowed the gap to the championship leader, who suffered a torrid weekend, “and if we can get just a couple of test days under our belt now and work a bit more, we will be able to go even quicker. There’s a lot more still to come!”
