Ash Hand had the misfortune to twice find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time just when it counted the most in the fifth round of 2010 in the fiercely-contested national Super 1 Series at Larkhall in Scotland – but by dint of a superbly consistent performance, the highly-rated young Nuneaton karting star still succeeded in outscoring every single one of his rivals north of the border.
Having achieved his maiden triumph aboard a CRG chassis – onto which he had switched only the previous month – at the same circuit a week earlier, Ash returned to Larkhall buoyant about his prospects. A brilliant pole position in qualifying – in a 40-strong Junior Max class field representing pretty much the toughest competition you will find anywhere – marked an impeccable way to begin.
“I felt really confident going into the weekend,” acknowledged the Maple Park teenager. “I knew we had the pace after the club meeting – winning that against some very good drivers had been a real boost – so I was thinking we had a good chance of winning again. We’ve had so much bad luck in Super 1 this year so I was really hoping for a good result – and I think I deserved one, to be fair. I’ve driven well all season, but just haven’t had the luck. I felt I needed to prove that I can race at the front and finish at the front.
“I was extremely pleased to get pole, because it proved I had more speed than anybody else in the field. I like Larkhall, and if you can get it all hooked-up round there it’s quite easy to set consistently fast lap times – but if you make just two mistakes, with so many drivers on the pace it means your chances are effectively over, so the pressure was certainly there.”
The 16-year-old made no mistakes at all in his two heat races, effortlessly driving off into the distance in the first and going on to out-race no fewer than four adversaries in a far more fraught second encounter, as his intense duel with Andy King enabled three other drivers to latch onto their scrap in the closing stages and led the George Eliot school pupil to concede that ‘when you’re in a dogfight and you win, it’s a big confidence boost – it felt so good to beat them all like that, because I was under a lot of pressure and I knew I had to defend as if my life depended on it’.
Having put not so much as a wheel out-of-place during his clean sweep of pole and double victory in the heats, Ash was very much, as he likes to say, ‘on it like Sonic’ – and also on pole for the pre-final.
“I knew it was going to be difficult, because the field was so tight that it put the emphasis on being able to defend well,” he explained. “I knew it would be all about staying consistent and putting the lap times in – the more consistent I could be, the harder it would be for the others to keep up.
“Andy and I drove away from the rest of the field again and built up around a two-second gap. Towards the end we started battling, and with about a minute to go there was a backmarker ahead. He slowed down and looked over his shoulder, but he saw we weren’t quite going to catch him by the end of the straight, so he picked up his speed again.
“Heading towards the hairpin I think he didn’t know whether to back off or not, so I stayed on the racing line in case he turned in on me and Andy just slid straight up the inside of both of us. He held me out wide, and because we were so close on lap times and there were about five kart-lengths between us after that, I couldn’t catch him again in time. I was happy in the sense that second place was still my best result of the year so far in Super 1, but I had wanted to win.”
Simply if frustratingly a case of wrong place, wrong time, a not altogether dissimilar scenario would go on to play out in the grand final later on, when from the unfavourable outside line of the grid, Ash was in one of the box seats for a particularly ‘lively’ opening lap.
“At the start I fell back to fourth, but then the leader’s chain fell off and into the same corner Matt Parry went over the back of Andy King,” he recalled. “After that, as Andy was going down the straight his coil came loose, and all of that put me into the lead!
“Like in the pre-final, I led virtually all the way, but towards the end Oliver Hodgson managed to get up the inside of me. I was lining him up to try to get him back again and saw my opportunity – he was driving tight and defensively everywhere, so I went out wide in an effort to get the cut-back on him up the inside on the exit of the first hairpin – and then the yellow flags came out, so I couldn’t overtake. That was really frustrating, because again I had wanted to win so much.”
With the race ending under a neutralisation, the P1 Racing ace was once more reluctantly forced to settle for P2 – but that still meant he notched up more points than any of his competitors over the course of the weekend, and with his new chassis coming on all the time, Ash Hand and CRG are fast becoming the package to beat.
What’s more, the brace of rostrum finishes – his first of the 2010 Super 1 campaign – have significantly boosted the Warwickshire hotshot’s championship standing, and he makes it clear that he is aiming for more of the same, if not even a little bit better still, at Shenington and Three Sisters near Wigan before the season draws to a close.
“Shenington is a good track, and although it’s essentially a power circuit, the corners that it does have I’m quite good around,” he mused in conclusion. “Wigan I haven’t been too that much, but I won there in Mini Max, so it should be good and I’m feeling pretty confident for both. I was a bit disappointed not to be on the top step of the podium at Larkhall, but hopefully next time...”
