Wins for Hall, Zhou & podium for Eastwood gets S1 campaign underway
Fresh from its strong start to the Euro Max Challenge, Strawberry Racing carried its winning momentum into the opening round of the Super One championship, at Three Sisters (7 April) - claiming victories in the Mini and Junior Max classes, with reigning Grand Finals champion, Charlie Eastwood runner up in Senior Max.
The Mini Max entry of 42 driversthe largest fieldpresented early season favourite, Connor Hall with a stern challenge. However, the youngster from Bristol emerged from the heats with flying colours to take pole position for the pre-final.
A perfect start saw Connor hold onto his startline advantage as the rest of the pack jockeyed for position behind, allowing him to escape with another driver. Setting a blistering pace and not putting a wheel wrong, the number five seed extended his lead to some 8 seconds, as the chasing group began to dispute 2nd spot. The gap stabilised at this margin, and from there Hall stroked his kart home to take first blood. Connors teammate, the American Darren Keane, made a good fist of his first experience of Super One competition. Darren qualified 13th on the grid for the first final, but was a victim of some of the mid-pack action and ultimately crossed the line in 25th spot.
Hall again made no mistakes at the start of the main final, initially easing away from his closest rivals. However, they were able to claw him back when an official dashed onto the track and into his path, forcing him to brake sharply. The Strawberry ace then had to firmly defend his advantage before settling himself and pulling away once more. This time his margin of victory would be nowhere near as emphatic as before, but he crossed the line over half a second clear to take maximum points and the points lead. Darren fared better and finished inside the top twenty to get his challenge underway. Guan Yu Zhou is arguably one of, if not the, most exciting motorsport talent to emerge from China and for the past two seasons has promised a big win. It finally came at Wigan and he was visibly delighted to seal his maiden Super One victory - and on his S1 debut in the Junior Max ranks. He laid down a marker with wins in both his heats and was joined on the front row of the pre-final grid by teammate Ben Hingeley, with fellow Strawberry driver Max Aitken directly behind him on p3 and Swedens Jessica Backman qualifying on the 6th row.
It was Aitken who out-gunned Zhou on the run into the first corner, but the former Shanghai resident quickly fought back and was never headed again. Similarly, Max was able to go clear of the fight for 3rd involving Ben. Try as he might, Hingeley could not find an opening and had to settle for 4th. Jessicas hopes of a good race were sidelined by an opening lap crash, leaving her with work to do in the following race.
Loading up is something a of a feature in this class and Three Sisters monster straight means that the driver at the front of that train arrives at the first corner far faster than he, or the officials, would wish. Guan Yu was lucky to avoid a big accident as the field barrelled into Turn One. Max was less fortunate and dropped to 8th in the ensuing chaos. Damage to his Tony Kart EVK chassis meant that he plummeted to last place, although he bravely soldiered on. Completing the 22 laps just a handful of places ahead of him was the similarly luckless Jessica. In contrast, Bens efforts were rewarded with 3rd place and his first silverware with the team.
Proving that he has lost none of the form that carried him to the Rotax world title last December, Charlie Eastwood claimed pole position for the Seniors first final, with reigning Junior Euro and Grand Finals champion Harry Webb on row two. Andreas Backman qualified on p12 with Kyle Fowlie just making the cut for automatic qualification in 25th spot.
Once the initial skirmishes had settled down, the race saw little further action leaving Eastwood to drive for points on the board and take 2nd, with Webb adopting a similar view in 4th. Andreas finished where he started but Kyle was classified 18th after being given a five-place penalty.
A controversial start to the second final saw Eastwood drop to 6th before colliding with another driver and losing more ground, eventually finishing 9th. Webb battled hard but had to be content with 5th. Also unable to make significant progress, Backman received the chequered flag in 14th. Fowlie gave a strong indication of what might have been had things fallen his way sooner, with a superb drive from the back of the grid to 8th. Weve traditionally gone very well here, so I was really pleased to see that our material and drivers were right up there in all three classes, said Strawberry team manager Warwick Ringham. Connor is on fire at the moment and deserves his latest success. The same can be said for Joe (Guan Yu Zhou) after the disappointment of Genk he deserved the result.
He added: We have a talented young squad with different levels of experience, so to see Darren do well in a totally new environment was great, whilst Andreas and Jessica are also making improvements with each outing. Being world champions, we expect a lot of Harry and Charlie and its easy to forget that Harry was a junior until recently. Senior Max is very hard this year, so we have no excuses. We did okay but theres a bit more we need to do before the next round but Im confident well be where it matters, when it matters.
