In one of his very last karting outings prior to stepping up to cars, highly-rated young Warwickshire star Jordan King concluded an impressive 2010 campaign by confirming his standing as one of the very leading competitors on the global stage.

The finale of the hotly-contested, inaugural WSK World Series took place at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt – both a circuit and a country that, like the preceding rounds in Portugal and the USA, Jordan had never previously visited. An engine seizure in qualifying that left him last-but-one on the grid for all three of his heat races and on the back foot from thereon in did not get proceedings off to the greatest of starts.

“It’s a good track, bumpy in places but fun to drive,” the 16-year-old revealed. “There are a few banked corners, too, which are a lot quicker than normal corners – and in other parts it was quite tight-and-twisty.”

The latter characteristics did not make it an easy circuit at which to make progress from a lowly starting position – compounded by which, Jordan explained, ‘it was really dusty off-line, which meant that whenever you overtook someone you would both lose a lot of time...kind of like taking one step forward to go two steps back’.

Whilst never far from the outright pace, in his opening heat race the Stoneleigh-based speed demon found himself unexpectedly run into by an errant rival on the rolling-up lap, leaving him an unrepresentative 14th at the chequered flag – and then in heat two, the very same driver edged him onto the grass no sooner had the starting lights gone out. In the circumstances, ninth place was a remarkable recovery effort, whilst heat three yielded tenth.

A second engine failure in Sunday morning’s warm-up session – something of an unfortunate theme to the weekend – offered Jordan scant encouragement ahead of the pre-final, which he would begin 11th.

“We got a good start, and for the first five laps or so our pace was quite good, but then midway through we dropped off a bit,” he recounted. “We improved again towards the end, but by then the gap ahead was just too big to close back up and I finished eighth. In the grand final I then got a really good start up into sixth, but after that just slowly went backwards.”

Whilst 11th spot at the close was not how he had wanted to wind up the season – and perhaps also his karting career, barring one last possible meeting later this month – it nonetheless proved enough to lift Jordan from seventh in the championship table to sixth, no mean feat at all when you consider that he was up against a whole host of experienced and esteemed international adversaries of a very high calibre indeed.

With a full-time graduation into cars in the Formula Renault UK Winter Series now literally just around the corner, the Princethorpe College student and Hugo Boss brand ambassador was quick to praise his loyal mechanic Stuart Wright and the Piers Sexton-run PSR outfit to which he had switched mid-season, and whose expertise he credits with helping him to get the best out of his driving and fulfil his tremendous potential.

“It was up-and-down really,” he mused of his WSK World Series fortunes. “We had a good first round at Portimão where we finished up on the podium, but then the second round in America was terrible – very disappointing – and in Egypt we weren’t massively quick all weekend.

“All of the leading drivers from the WSK Euro Series entered the World Series too, so the competition was certainly pretty tough. It was hard racing, and the more you pitch yourself up against top-class European drivers like that, the better you yourself become for it. All three tracks were new to me as well, but it’s always enjoyable to discover and gain experience of different circuits – they all have their own individual challenges. It was good to see so many new places around the world, too.

“I will miss karting – I’ll miss the close racing and the sheer amount of overtaking that goes on, because I know that won’t be the same in cars – and I’ll also miss all the friends I’ve made, but I’m really looking forward to moving into cars now. I’m ready to take the next step up the motorsport ladder.”