Jordan King demonstrated exactly why he is regarded as one of the very best karters Britain has to offer with an eye-catching performance in the prestigious CIK-FIA KF2 World Championship at Zuera in Spain, as he displayed front-running form throughout what was billed as arguably the toughest event in the sport’s history.
Zuera – close to the Aragonese city of Zaragoza – was the scene of Jordan’s European debut just under two years ago, and it is a circuit that the young Warwickshire star palpably enjoys. On his return and up against indubitably one of the highest-calibre fields ever seen, he lapped consistently inside the top three during practice come rain or shine – leaving him to head into the wet qualifying session comfortable in the equipment underneath him and, to borrow his expression, ‘chilled’.
“Everyone from KF2 and Super KF was there, and everyone was fast,” the 16-year-old revealed. “It was effectively 118 drivers all capable of winning and definitely the hardest field I’ve ever raced against, but I was really looking forward to it. I like the track – you need to get everything right to be quick over a single lap, which isn’t easy – and I’ve done well there in the past too, so I was confident we’d have the pace.
“On my ‘out’ lap in qualifying, Nyck de Vries crashed into me, which bent my rear bumper. That may have cost me a little bit in terms of lap time, but I still ended up third in my group and tenth overall. I was fairly happy with that.”
From third on the grid for all three of his heat races, Jordan tallied a brilliant victory and a brace of strong and competitive third places, impressively maintaining his composure in a pressure-cooker situation. With much at stake and consequently much to lose, he put not so much as a wheel out-of-place.
“In the first heat I made a good start and got into the lead, and then Jordon Lennox-Lamb, Emanuele Pagani and I broke away from the pack,” he recounted. “I fell back to second behind Lennox-Lamb and sat behind him until his engine seized coming onto the straight. That was unfortunate for him but it helped me, as it turned it from a three horse race into just the two of us.
“That took the pressure off a little bit, and whilst Pagani then passed me for the lead, I was always confident of getting it back again. It was just a case of timing it right, which I did with a couple of laps to go and then pulled out enough of a gap to hold on.”
His results placed him a superb third in the intermediate rankings – what he described, with characteristic understatement, as ‘alright’. With only the top 34 competitors – or less than 30 per cent – progressing on to the finals the following day, however, it was far more than merely ‘alright’, and Jordan acknowledged that his first-ever CIK-FIA press conference in the full glare of the world’s media was ‘pretty cool really, and not as daunting as I had thought it would be’. On current form, he had better get used to the spotlight.
“In the pre-final I held third through the first two corners, and then at the first hairpin on the opening lap I moved into the lead,” the Harbury-based hotshot went on, “but then into the second hairpin later around the lap I got passed and forced wide. Off-line at Zuera it’s really dusty, so that left me with dirt on my tyres, which slowed me down for the rest of the lap as I tried to scrub it off again.
“It’s a vicious circle, because you’re sliding around so you get overtaken, and that pushes you wide again and you end up with even more dirt on your tyres. I fell a long way back – down as far as 15th or 16th, I think – but our speed was really good after that and I just focussed my efforts on getting back as many places as I could. We ended up 11th, though if I hadn’t made that one little mistake I might have been able to get away and perhaps even win, which would have changed the whole course of the weekend.”
The equal second-fastest lap time underlined Jordan’s conviction, almost three tenths of a second quicker than that of the race-winner and a scant 36 thousandths shy of the best outright, and the Princethorpe College pupil would again prove to be right on the money in an incredibly evenly-matched grand final later in the day.
“I got up to seventh at the start,” he explained, “and heading down to the hairpin for the first time I kept in tight, but not tight enough obviously as I got passed and dropped to 11th. Behind me there was a big gap back to the rest, but after that it was a hard race with lots of to-ing and fro-ing in terms of lap time, and as everyone at the front was lapping at virtually the same pace as each other right down to thousandths of a second, I wasn’t able to make any positions back up and finished 11th again.
“The end result was a little disappointing given the pace we’d had over the weekend and what we might have achieved, but looking on the positive side, it was good to be right up there like we were after a bad start to the season. We changed teams and equipment recently to go with Piers Sexton, and since then we’ve found a lot of speed – that’s encouraging for the remainder of the year.”
The top driver with a Birel chassis and BMB engine combination, Jordan was also one of the youngest competitors to finish so high up the order in the grand final, having been racing for less than a handful of years when some of his immediate adversaries had a decade’s worth experience or more already under their belts. Not only that, but seven of those that wound up ahead of him are either World or European Champions – and to be mixing it with them was no mean feat at all.
“I was pleased with the form we showed,” he concluded. “We proved we can take the fight to all the established names and champions, and at the end of the day it will give us confidence for moving onto different things next year.”
