Ryan Anderton was firmly in the mix for glory in the fourth meeting of 2011 in the eagerly-contested national Super 1 Series at Larkhall in Scotland, but the highly-rated Somerset karting star found his bid derailed right at the end of the weekend by a very literal sting in the tail.
Having only competed at Larkhall once before, Ryan conceded that he was ‘at a bit of a disadvantage compared to drivers who had more experience round there’, but he refused to let that deter him and, impressively ‘on it’ from the outset, he was the pace during practice.
Acknowledging that ‘it’s a good circuit, very challenging and you really need to maintain your concentration all the way round the lap’, the Glastonbury-based speed demon entered qualifying in positive spirits, only for niggling carburettor woes to stymie his efforts and leave him down in eighth place in the fiercely-competitive, 28-strong Comer Cadet class field – the very crème de la crème of young British driving talent – just over a third-of-a-second adrift of the benchmark.
Still confident in his ability to fight back in his two heat races, Ryan claimed an extremely solid fourth position in the opening encounter and was intelligently working in tandem with another driver to reel in the leaders in the next when he inadvertently clipped the rear bumper of the kart ahead and slipped outside of the top ten.
The St. Dunstan’s Community School pupil produced a gritty recovery to eighth at the chequered flag, simply running out of laps to regain any further ground and – whilst understandably disappointed by the outcome – maturely vowing to put it behind him and look ahead to the two all-important finals, the first of which he would begin seventh.
“Going into the first corner, I had no brakes and went off the track, and when I came back on, someone went up the inside and bounced into me,” he recalled. “That sent me briefly up in the air, and it really hurt when I landed again. It felt like I had cracked my ribs on the seat – though fortunately I hadn’t – and I just had to fight my way back from there.
“There are some good opportunities to overtake round Larkhall, but still, it was a bit nerve-wracking trying to come through. The good thing was that we seemed to have rediscovered our form after the problems we’d had in qualifying and the heats – without what happened at the start, we would definitely have been in the front pack, and who knows what we could have done from there..?”
Battling his way back to where he had started – seventh – in evidence of his raw pace and potential, Ryan halved the gap to the race-winner by the end, winding up a scant 1.7 seconds shy of victory notwithstanding his early trials-and-tribulations that had seen him tumble as low as 14th. In the second final later in the day, the 11-year-old would prove to be right up at the sharp end throughout in a tight four-way scrap for supremacy. Until...
“Towards the end – just as I had passed my team-mate for third place – disaster struck,” he recounted. “A wasp flew into my helmet and started crawling down my face; I came round the corner and suddenly saw this little bump, and as soon as I realised what it was, I opened my visor and tried to flick it out again.
“I was determined not to get stung – my dad was bitten on his face on holiday and it had swollen up big-time, so I really wanted to avoid that – but luckily, because I was going so fast, once I had got it out it just flew away. Unfortunately, though, it affected my concentration briefly and caused me to swerve and run wide, and the time I lost allowed the leaders to get away from me and the guys behind to catch up. I ended up finishing fourth, and I was a bit gutted by that, if I’m honest, because I knew that without the wasp I could have won.”
Whilst the offending insect did dutifully buzz off, it had already stung Ryan’s hopes of lifting the laurels – but he nonetheless professed himself satisfied with the general outcome of what he described as an unusually troubled and as such relatively ‘off’ weekend. Rarely the out-and-out quickest over the course of the meeting, the Fusion Motorsport ace more than made up for that with his sublime racecraft skills – and his reward was another trophy for his overflowing cabinet. There are 71 of them there now, many from this year.
With his contentious technical exclusion from the 2011 Super 1 curtain-raiser at PF International meaning – through no fault of his own – that he is no longer in the title hunt, Ryan has progressed from 20th in the drivers’ standings pre-Larkhall to 14th now, close to the top ten and just 88 points away from the lead...or the equivalent of two fourth places.
The only race the West Country hotshot started at PF, he won, so the likelihood is that the finals would have yielded rather better than just fourth place. Frustrating or encouraging? Well, that’s a moot point. But what might have been..? No question.
