with podium against-the-odds on adversity-stricken weekend
Ash Hand faced more adversity and ill-fortune in the third meeting of the hotly-fought 2010 Formula Kart Stars (FKS) Championship at Glan Y Gors than most drivers encounter in an entire season – but through gutsy determination and a doughty never-say-die attitude, the highly-rated young Nuneaton star came away again with a totally unexpected podium finish and still sitting atop the title standings.
In only his second national outing on his new CRG chassis since switching from Kosmic – and third outing on it full-stop – Ash travelled to North Wales buoyed by a strong showing in fellow British series Super 1 at Buckmore Park the weekend previously and firmly intent on maintaining the impeccable run that had seen him imperiously triumph in all four FKS finals of the campaign to-date.
“I feel a lot more comfortable on the CRG now,” he affirmed. “I can really throw it around and do whatever I want with it – and in testing at Whilton Mill, we were quicker than we had been in the Super 1 meeting there on the Kosmic. It’s completely different to the Kosmic, so much so it’s unreal – the brakes are much sharper, and sometimes when I touch them I still get it a bit out-of-shape.
“There’s probably still a tenth of a second or so that I can find from it. When I hook it all up and get the lap right it’s really good; it’s just all about learning how to be consistent with it now – that’s the main thing I need to focus on at the moment.
“I felt really confident going into the weekend; the kart felt good, and we had been on the pace at Buckmore. I’m not a huge fan of Glan Y Gors, though – it’s a bit of a bouncy and rough circuit in terms of the tarmac and kerbs – and last year there in FKS, pretty much everything that could go wrong electrically did go wrong!”
Sadly, as they say, history does have an unwelcome habit of repeating itself sometimes, and a far-from-ideal lack of spare parts during practice on Friday left Ash unable to perform any meaningful set-up work – though the Maple Park hotshot was still fastest straight out-of-the-box when he hit the track. And then a bad set of tyres scuppered his qualifying chances the following day.
“We were four tenths off what we had been in practice,” he rued. “We did a back-to-back tyre test after the weekend, and the set we’d had was that much slower than the other one we tried. I was driving pretty well lap-after-lap, but it just wasn’t giving me back what I was putting in – we were miles off, and though it all felt fine when I was in the kart, when I came round and saw the lap time every time it was just slow.
“Nothing felt particularly out-of-place, so we struggled to get our heads around it. I had to try to keep my spirits up to be able to do the job properly, but after qualifying I was a bit down and disappointed, because we just didn’t have a clue what was wrong. I was even doubting myself, because I couldn’t see anything physically amiss with the kart. It wasn’t until Monday that we discovered what the problem was...”
Eighth position amongst the 27-strong Junior Max class field – in the same series as had first set a certain Lewis Hamilton, no less, on the fast track towards future superstardom and one that now boasts the prestigious official backing of both the youngest-ever F1 World Champion and the sport’s influential ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone – was unaccustomed territory indeed for a driver who had not hitherto qualified off the front row of the grid all year, and had sealed pole position three times out of four.
Lapping only a tenth of a second shy of pole and a scant two hundredths adrift of P3 went to show that the missing four tenths from the tyres would have made all the difference and could well have changed the entire complexion of the day, but a mature and composed effort to recover from a difficult first lap in heat one secured Ash an excellent third place at the chequered flag, with the fastest lap of the race underlining his speed. Unfortunately, heat two would prove to be a disaster.
“I got hung out to dry at the start due to being on the outside line,” he recounted. “I kept trying to cut across to the inside around the opening lap, but there was never anywhere to go; I lost eight places trying to find a gap to get in and dropped down to 16th, and then somebody just took me out. I got shoved over the kerb and into a spin, and because of that my team-mate went straight into the side of me, which bent the kart out by three inches.
“I started the final 11th, but across the line the kart just wouldn’t go. I think the mixture was too rich because it had been such a slow rolling-up lap and the engine had oiled up. I dropped back to 18th as a result of that and then spent the whole race playing catch-up. As the first corner at Glan Y Gors is immediately followed by a straight, everybody has to filter in and that causes big gaps to form over the first lap – there were four seconds from P1 back to P10 alone. Those gaps also made fighting my way through quite difficult; it’s a hard circuit at which to try and catch people, but when I did, overtaking them wasn’t a problem.”
Indeed, with the only opportunity to make up time on his adversaries being under braking into the corners, Ash pulled off an impressive recovery job in the circumstances as he charged his way back through to sixth with fastest lap once more to his credit – and it says something that the result marked his worst finish to-date of the 2010 FKS campaign by some margin. And then Sunday would begin in a crushingly disappointing manner...
“Coming out of the hairpin on only my second lap in qualifying, the chain just fell off!” the 16-year-old revealed. “I was pretty angry about that, because I hadn’t touched the kerb at all or even had chance to set a single competitive lap time, which meant I would be starting both heats right from the back.
“In heat one, I came out of the first corner tenth having begun 25th; because it was wet, people were all understeering into each other, so just by keeping it tight I was able to make up 15 places. After that, I worked my way through to fifth. It was raining and the kart felt amazing in the wet – really easy to drive and the grip was just there.
“There was a problem in that the steering bolt was loose, though – when I went to turn into corners it initially didn’t do anything. The steering wheel just wobbled, and I had to put full-lock on to get it to do what I needed it to. I was having to try so hard to turn and just to keep holding onto the kart, and that killed the tyres – I actually got into the lead at one stage, but then I got pushed back down to third because my tyres were cooked. That made it more draining than it would have been, but physically I was able to handle it and still get the kart round.”
Given that his steering wheel was close to falling off at the end of the race and that he had also been forced to battle against wrong tyre pressures, that Ash made a staggering 20-place gain on his starting position was an incredible accomplishment. The George Eliot School pupil would similarly slice through the field like the proverbial hot knife through butter in heat two, finishing third on-the-road before being handed a questionable and overly-harsh five-place penalty following a confusing start. He would consequently begin the all-important final – by which time the rain had dispersed – from P5.
“It was quite a tough race,” he acknowledged. “We didn’t really have the pace we needed and I initially slipped back to sixth. I was working really, really hard again and just not getting anything back. I kept pushing, though, and eventually got into the lead and managed to hold it for quite a few laps. I dropped down to fourth at one point and was going backwards, but I was able to scrape back second – although by then the new leader had driven off. I was catching him by two tenths a lap again towards the end.”
A hard-fought runner-up spot represented a superb job of damage limitation all-told, as well as Ash’s fifth podium finish from six starts this year. The fact that his mechanic had erroneously left a wet set-up on the kart when the track was by then bone dry didn’t help his cause much along the way either – “Turning-in killed the front end and just stopped the kart on its nose; it was hopeless...it wouldn’t go through the fast stuff or the slower corners how I wanted it to,” he mused, summarising that it had been ‘all a bit of a shambles’ – but significantly, the P1 Racing ace retained his championship lead in circumstances that would have seen many lose their way.
What’s more, with a busy schedule ahead now of Super 1 at Larkhall in Scotland, the prestigious annual Kartmasters meeting at PF International – at which he will endeavour to defend the hard-fought and coveted ‘GP’ plate he clinched there last year – and FKS’ next stop at Genk in Belgium all coming up in swift succession, Ash is optimistic about his prospects of getting his season successfully back on-track.
“I learned a lot about the kart and how to use the brakes better,” he concluded of his Glan Y Gors weekend. “I learned a lot about how other drivers race as well; until then in FKS this year, because I’d always been so fast I hadn’t really raced anyone else as such. I found out how different drivers operate, which is always useful to know.
“I’m really confident about Larkhall; I know the track well and was two tenths up the road there in Super 1 last year, and I’ve been told the CRG usually performs really well around the circuit – it’s one of the best tracks in Britain for the chassis. Last year I had the opportunity to win and it was snatched away from me when I was excluded from the first final due to a mechanic’s error. In the second final I was three tenths quicker than everyone else each lap, but because I’d had to start from the back of the grid, I could only come through to 12th. This time, the goal has to be to win...”
