on second leg of Indian Odyssey
If he had not already done enough to underline his outstanding credentials in the sport a week earlier, then Jordan King’s second outing in the MRF Formula 1600 Championship in India left nobody in any doubt – as the highly-rated young Warwickshire driver took his strike rate of successes to an impressive 50 per cent, and showed a clean pair of heels to a current F1 driver in the process.
Having proven to be the quickest competitor in the field the previous time out around the Madras Motor Race Track only to be left with just a single victory to his credit as Lady Luck turned her back on him, Jordan returned to Chennai knowing that he would not be faced with needing to learn both the circuit and his Van Diemen-designed, Ford Duratec-powered single-seater as he had done seven days earlier – but equally, he also knew that he would likely be in for a tougher time of things second time around.
“Everyone else had caught up a bit by the end of the first weekend, so I knew it would be harder and that I wouldn’t have as much of a margin as before,” the 16-year-old mused. “I still felt confident, though, and I knew what I needed to do.
“In testing, our speed was good again and we made a couple more changes to the car which seemed to help – we found a bit of time from that – but because it’s a one-make series and everyone is under the same awning, it’s hard to make a change and then keep it to yourself. The others can copy you pretty easily, so you don’t tend to gain a massive advantage when you find something.”
As he had anticipated, Jordan was given a run for his money in qualifying this time, but he still put his Team Sidvin machine on pole position for the first two races – and on both occasions, he simply and seamlessly cleared off into the distance to notch up a brace of emphatic triumphs.
“I made a cautious start in race one as I was concentrating more on holding position,” reported the Stoneleigh-based speed demon. “I was challenged through the first few corners, but after that I pushed hard and was able to build a bit of a gap so that I didn’t really need to defend. After about five laps there was no real pressure, to be honest, and then I just chilled out because I had a big enough lead not to have to worry about it anymore.
“The second race was even better. I got a good start and didn’t need to defend, and then I just got it nailed and pushed really hard for the first three laps and actually broke the lap record. That had been set by Narain Karthikeyan when he had tested the car a couple of weeks beforehand. I pulled out five seconds within five laps and then just chilled out again for the last ten laps without needing to push at all.”
To put that achievement into perspective, Karthikeyan will this year be making his F1 return with Hispania Racing and is a former race-winner in the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport, so to outpace someone of that calibre and pedigree at such a formative stage of his own motor racing career is little short of breath-taking. The results also meant that Jordan entered the final race of the weekend – from fourth position on a reversed grid – bidding for the hat-trick. That was indubitably on the cards as he rapidly showed himself to be the fastest driver on-track once again – until a misunderstanding with a rival put the Princethorpe College student on the grass, leaving him with limited braking ability and sending him bouncing out-of-control as his car became airborne and subsequently landed again with ‘quite a big impact’.
It was palpably not the way he had wanted to wrap up the weekend, but then as the old adage goes, two-out-of-three ain’t bad, and with three wins out of six in total – four if you include the race from which he and a number of adversaries were excluded on technical grounds – it remained a thoroughly positive outcome. As he prepares now to return his focus to his upcoming Formula Renault UK campaign, the Hugo Boss brand ambassador paused to reflect upon the lessons taken from his Indian Odyssey.
“I’m very pleased with the way the two weekends have gone,” he affirmed. “It has been a great experience, both on and off the track. It’s been good to get some dry running and to try a car that is so different to the Formula Renault. We might have lost some track time against drivers who have been testing in Formula Renault UK, but in the long run I think this will benefit us massively.
“There was lot of racing, a lot of PR and a lot of practice in front of the camera doing interviews – and I’m happy with the results I achieved. The whole experience will stand me in good stead for the rest of the year and for the future, so overall, I think it was really encouraging from a career point-of-view.”
