As he continues to prepare for the serious business to come – an assault on the leading positions in British championships Super 1 and the Lewis Hamilton and Bernie Ecclestone-backed Formula Kart Stars – Ryan Anderton has given himself a timely lift with a starring performance to clinch the runner-up spoils as the 2011 Winter Series visited PF International.
Having proven to be quick but out-of-luck at Shenington in Oxfordshire a week earlier, Ryan headed north-east to Lincolnshire eager to turn his fortunes on their head and come away again with a trophy. He would not disappoint.
“I was hoping for a really good result to get my confidence back up,” confessed the 11-year-old Glastonbury-based hotshot. “I wanted to finish first inside the team and in the top two or three overall. I enjoy PF as a circuit and I’ve had good results there in the past – I finished second the previous time I had been there. I like the hairpins in particular, because they’re quite demanding. It was a big grid, with some really strong drivers and a lot of seeded numbers – that made it quite tough out on-track, and really close.”
That much was evidenced by Ryan’s three heats, in which he finished fifth – following a meteoric getaway from 19th, and taking the chequered flag barely a second shy of the race-winner – sixth and a luckless 14th, finding himself nudged wide and frustratingly sent into a spin and plummeting down the order just as he had been sitting in a challenging third position and lining himself up for an attack on the two leaders.
Nonetheless, having shown that he indubitably had the pace, the combination of results left the St. Dunstan’s Community School pupil seventh on the grid for the all-important final and feeling ‘reasonably confident’. Not to mention fired-up.
“I seem to have developed a knack of making good starts, and I was able to push the drivers ahead as we went across the line and then just slipped up the inside of them,” Ryan reflected. “That worked really well, but I still hadn’t expected to come out of the first corner in second place!
“The leader and I pulled out quite a gap, before another driver broke away from the chasing pack and began to catch us, but then I think his chain came off so that put him out of the equation. I looked behind and saw he had gone and that we had a huge gap again, which took the pressure off a bit and meant I could concentrate on looking forwards rather than back.
“I tried to push myself and the leader even further away from the pack and I was planning to attack him on the last lap, but he defended the whole way round. He opened the door slightly into the last corner and I went for a lunge – there was half a move there but he squeezed me and it would have been pretty 50/50, so I backed out of it rather than risk an accident. I would have preferred to finish first obviously, but I was still pleased to be second.”
Justifiably so, and the runner-up trophy meant Ryan comfortably realised both of his stated objectives, too, as he ably established himself as the Fusion Motorsport standard-bearer over the weekend. As he turns his attentions towards his next challenge, the West Country ace mused that he does so bullish about his prospects for success.
“I’m feeling a lot more positive now than I did after Shenington,” he asserted in conclusion. “This result was definitely a good confidence boost.”
