seals transformation from tail-ender to front-runner

It had been coming for a while, truth be told, but young Rotherham karting star Luke Whitworth’s maiden triumph in the sport at PF International has left the fast-improving teenager with his confidence sky-high – and now he has tasted victory once, he is eager to taste it again.

Luke has enjoyed an extremely positive first few months to 2011, with a string of top five finishes around the country and up against fierce opposition. Similarly, the 16 Junior Max class rivals he faced in the opening round of Lincolnshire circuit PF’s Summer Series – including the driver who had claimed pole position in the national curtain-raiser a handful of weeks earlier and finished third in the British Championship last year – were of a very high calibre.

“I enjoy PF,” affirmed the Wickersley-based speed demon. “It’s my ‘local’ track, and I’ve done a lot of laps round there now – but you can always do more! We’d been having engine problems in recent weeks, so we had them rebuilt and the main reason for racing at PF, to be honest, was to put some mileage on them and try to get them back on-form – and they really came good. The kart had lots of grip, too, and with the track being quite slippery, that gave me the confidence to be able to push a bit harder.

“I started the first heat 11th, and by the second corner I was in the lead! I led for most of the race, but there was quite a strong headwind, so those behind me had an advantage down the straight – I had to stay consistent and make the time up through the corners.

“There was a fair bit of pressure, and I always knew there was another driver behind me right in my tow. It all came down to a bit of a battle on the last lap. He just pipped me in the end, but second place was still a good result, because the heats are all about racking up grid points towards the final.”

Missing out on the top spot by a scant tenth of a second at the chequered flag, Luke led all-bar the last lap – a barometer of just how much progress he has made since this time last year, when he was a relative newcomer to karting and very much at the tail end of the field.

In heat two, the 16-year-old was again right up at the sharp end when a mêlée into PF’s notoriously troublesome second hairpin cost him his nosecone and put him out-of-contention on the spot. Undeterred, he began his third heat 12th, made a staggering nine-place gain by the first corner alone and went on to finish a strong second again, less than a tenth adrift of the race-winner and with a much better fastest lap to-boot.

Lightning-quick starts were, indeed, a distinct feature of Luke’s Lincolnshire weekend – “I was just really confident in all the moves I was making and about where to put my kart,” he explained – and after beginning the all-important final from P5 with the knowledge following the heat races that he had the measure of every single one of his adversaries, on lap three, the Wickersley School and Sports College pupil hit the front...and never looked back.

Easing effortlessly away as his pursuers squabbled over the scraps in his wake, it was a truly faultless performance and one that saw the Yorkshire ace prevail by nigh-on ten seconds in the end, a veritable eternity in karting terms as he commandingly clinched his breakthrough success.

“I got another good start and moved straight into the lead, but I knew there was someone behind me so the pressure was on again,” he recollected. “I slowly pulled away, though, and once I had broken the tow, I was able to keep putting in laps that were within a couple of tenths of each other. We were consistent right the way through the race, which helped a lot, and once I got a few kart-lengths clear, I was just pushing my own air.

“We were the quickest all weekend, so that proved we had the pace and it felt brilliant to win, especially with there being some good drivers there. We know we can do it now, and that’s really boosted my confidence for the meetings to come.”

Understandably, Luke may not have had a great deal of experience of leading during his fledgling career to-date, but at PF, he handled it all like a seasoned pro, and he admitted that ‘we’ve been lacking a little bit of racecraft until now, but it’s all coming together and it felt really good to be out in the lead like that’.

On current form, it is a feeling he will need to start getting used to...