He came, he saw and he conquered, did Jordan King on his debut in the 2011 MRF Formula Championship at Chennai in India – but despite being the fastest driver in attendance by quite some margin, the highly-rated young Warwickshire star had to overcome considerable adversity in order to ultimately emerge on top.
Jordan travelled to the Madras Motor Race Track preparing to pit himself against an eclectic field of adversaries including a brace of compatriots in the form of an ex-Formula Ford Festival-winner and an erstwhile British F3 front-runner – both of whom had significantly more car racing experience than him – as well as some Finnish Formula Renault contenders and a clutch of local specialists, the defending MRF Formula 1600 class champion amongst them.
“I wasn’t really thinking specifically about beating the other two Brits,” revealed the ambitious Stoneleigh-based speed demon. “My goal is always to beat everybody! I wanted to do well, obviously, and I thought we would have a good chance, but to be honest, on this occasion it was more about the experience than the results. In testing, we were quite a bit quicker than anybody else, which was a good confidence boost. The surface of the track is very bumpy, but I liked it – it’s a fast layout, and one that suited my driving style well.”
The circuit might have come relatively easily to him, but for a driver more accustomed to the finely-honed aerodynamics of a Formula Renault UK machine, the Van Diemen-designed, Ford Duratec-powered single-seater took a little more getting used to, with the 16-year-old swiftly discovering it to be a far more physically demanding proposition and learning as he battled alternately against understeer and oversteer that he needed to drive it hard to get it to behave as he wanted it to.
There was also the small matter of a sequential gearbox rather than paddle-shift to get to grips with, and the fact that the car ‘doesn’t have a great deal of power, so you can’t make a mistake because you don’t have the power to correct it’. Be that as it may, Jordan still stuck it on pole position in qualifying – a staggering six tenths of a second out-of-reach of anybody else.
From there, he went on to thoroughly dominate the opening encounter, only for a 20-second post-race penalty for a jump-start and a subsequent exclusion on technical grounds – in company with a number of rivals – to cruelly snatch the glory away from underneath him. Arguably most telling of all, though, is the fact that even after the time addition had been taken into account, the Princethorpe College student still had enough of a gap over all-bar one of his pursuers to place second.
“I pushed all the way through even though I had a good lead,” he acknowledged. “Normally in that situation I would have backed off a little bit, but since I knew I had the penalty, I kept on pushing to try and build up as much of an advantage as I could.
“In the second race I was a bit cautious at the start after what had happened in race one, and I was beaten into the first corner. The leader was quite quick, and every time I got close to him or underneath his rear bumper I encountered massive understeer because I was in his dirty air, so I couldn’t get past.
“I could regularly get to within a car-length of him, but never quite close enough to actually make a move. We’d had to change the car slightly to meet with the rules following the disqualification, too, and as I hadn’t driven it like that before, I didn’t know what to expect from it.”
In the circumstances, the runner-up spoils were an excellent outcome, and from fourth position in a ‘reverse grid’ race three, Jordan wasted little time in exacting sweet revenge with a peerless triumph to the tune of nigh-on twelve seconds – as he sent out a potent calling-card of his intentions for when the championship returns to the same circuit for round two.
“I understood better how the car’s clutch worked by race three, so I knew what to do at the start,” reflected the Hugo Boss brand ambassador. “The previous two starts might not have gone right, but I nailed it this time and immediately moved up to second, and then on the third lap I took the lead. After that, I pulled out a bit of a gap and then just chilled out. I was always pretty comfortable.
“It was really good to get the win at the end of the weekend, especially as we should really have won all three races – we certainly had the pace to win them all. It would obviously have been better to get the results we should have done, but as I said, it was more about gaining experience and learning for the season ahead and for the future. For sure it’s going to be harder next time, but I’m aiming to do at least as well again in round two – if not better...”
