– and one of the secrets to his success
To be leading the British Championship and elect to switch chassis midway through the campaign is a risky strategy, some might say, and irrefutably a bold one – but to do so and then make that chassis work even better than the one you had been on before is inspired, and Ash Hand is very quick to pay tribute to the pivotal role played by CRG in his outstanding triumph in 2010.
Having begun the year on an Alonso mount – a derivative of the popular OTK brand – Ash rapidly established an advantage over his adversaries in the Junior Max class of the prestigious and fiercely-contested, Lewis Hamilton and Bernie Ecclestone-backed Formula Kart Stars Championship (FKS), but when his rivals began to eat away at that margin, the highly-rated young Nuneaton hotshot knew he needed to do something about it.
Cue the switch to Italian manufacturer CRG, a significant departure from the OTK in many aspects and a kart that – whilst having achieved tremendous success on the European and international stage – has struggled to gain much of a following on British shores. Ash swiftly demonstrated that such reticence and scepticism from his countrymen has been misguided in the extreme.
“At the time, the others were starting to catch me up after the start to the year that we’d had,” the 16-year-old recalled, “but when I moved onto the CRG, I just feel it gave me a crucial extra edge over them. It was a massive risk; we could quite easily have fallen off the face of the earth by making the decision we did, and it wasn’t an easy decision to make because some people were saying the CRG wasn’t as good as the OTK – but we soon found out they were wrong.
“People tend to follow each other’s lead in karting, and if someone says a certain product isn’t good, other people will believe them even if they haven’t tried it out for themselves – rumours spread like wildfire. We proved that the CRG is capable of winning races over here, which I don’t think all that many people were expecting, to be honest. The kart always performed, and we were fast everywhere by the end.”
And how, as he wasted little time in both defying and disproving the critics who had chastised him and his P1 Racing team as mad to make such a wholesale change with so much at stake. Conceding that ‘it took me perhaps a month to feel fully at home on the CRG’, before long Ash was back in his customary position at the front of the field – and, incredibly, even more dominant than he had been before.
Commanding performances at Larkhall in Scotland, Genk in Belgium and an incredible four victories one-after-the-other at Three Sisters near Wigan in FKS and fellow British series Super 1 bore ample testament to the CRG’s potential, and meant that come season’s end, the Maple Park speed demon was a force to be reckoned with in both national championships as he fairly blitzed the opposition. It was, truly, phenomenal.
“I really enjoyed the CRG,” enthused the North Warwickshire College student in conclusion. “It’s quite simple to set up, and really easy to drive – and by the end we could go to practically any circuit, put the kart down on the track and be fast enough to fight for the win. Once you get it really working for you, I think it’s probably the fastest kart out there in the dry or in the wet.
“The brakes are amazing; there’s nothing else like it for that – they stop the kart so quickly. It took me a while to get used to them to begin with, because most karts’ brakes aren’t as effective, but once I had done, I think they gave me an advantage as I was able to brake half a kart-length later than before, which can earn you as much as a tenth of a second a lap.
“We proved that the CRG is good enough to win in Britain, and also good enough to enable us to work our way back to the front of the grid quickly. I think the whole experience really helped to progress me as a driver, and if you are considering trying CRG, then you definitely should. It’s a really good kart – and one that you can go a long way with.”
