Madras born driver Karun Chandhok came up with his best drive of the season till date at the Donington Park circuit, moving from last at the start of the race to an eventual 4th place at the finish of the 18 lap race held in wet and greasy conditions. This is the Indian driver's best result of the season.

During the test held in torrential rain on the Wednesday leading up to the race, Karun was in good form and was consistently matching the laptimes of the front-runners. Unfortunately as it happened at Castle Combe a week earlier, qualifying didn't go the youngster's way and in both sessions he was caught out by the session being prematurely ended due to incidents involving other cars. Chandhok was left fuming on Saturday afternoon after qualifying "I can't believe how things are not falling into place for us. It's really frustrating for me and the team because we are always fast in testing and fast in the races but somehow in qualifying things just don't go to plan which is hurting us. On the computer data we could see that the time was there which was good enough to be in the top 4 when the session was stopped. The potential is there to run at the front but so far circumstances have prevented us from fulfilling that potential completely." Karun ended 13th and 9th in the two sessions.

The rain stopped falling just as the cars lined up for the start of Race 1 but the circuit was still very wet. As the starting lights went out, Karun bogged down and had to restart his engine which meant that by the time he got going, the entire field had gone past him. A stunning opening lap saw him catch and pass 5 cars. By lap 3 the charging 20 year old was up to 11th place and a lap later he passed team-mate Ryan Lewis and then muscled his way past the Australian driver Marcus Marshall. Karun then set about chasing down the Malaysian driver Fairuz Fauzy and the Portuguese driver Alvaro Parente. Chandhok was absolutely flying by this stage and chased down the duo by lapping over a second per lap faster. Once he caught them, the T-Sport driver made a daring move, sending the commentators hysterical, overtaking both Fauzy and Parente at one shot to move into 7th place. Recalling the move, he said, "I got a better exit out of the previous corner than both the guys ahead but my only choice to pass was to go on the part of the circuit where there was still a lot of water. I braked very late and nearly spun, but I knew I had to take a chance and it worked perfectly."

Chandhok then set about chasing down Carlin Motorsport's Danilo Dirani. Dirani was 6 seconds up the road from Karun with just 9 laps to go but by this stage the Indian was the fastest driver on the circuit and hunted down the reigning South American F3 Champion. With 3 laps to go Karun surprised the Brazilian by out braking him into the final hairpin. Dirani fought back on the way out and the two cars came past the start finish line just inches apart but the Indian was the one to brake later and squeezed ahead. As they started the final lap, Karun was 2.5 seconds behind championship contender James Rossiter. This proved a bit too much for Karun and he finished just 1.2 seconds behind Rossiter and in an eventual 4th place after Nelson Piquet and Danny Watts collided at the final corner. Afterwards Karun said "I really enjoyed that race. I was so angry after the start and I just kept pushing the whole race. The car was brilliant and for sure if we had a couple more laps we could've been on the podium."

Race 2 didn't go as well for the Indian. On the opening lap he was a victim of a 5 car collision at the "Melbourne hairpin" which caused damage to his front wing and although he put on a valiant battle for the first half of the race, there was no choice but to retire.

At the end of the weekend, T-Sport's Team Manager Russell Eacott was pleased with his young charge's progress, "In the wet race, Karun drove the best I've seen him drive in the last couple years. He was undoubtedly fast all weekend and showed it in the race. He also showed his thinking side by looking after the tyres and making sure they were able to last the distance. We seem to have the pace now of the front-runners in both testing and the races but somehow we always seem to have some bad luck mainly in qualifying but also in the races. If we can start to qualify a bit further up then things will start to fall into place, because in Formula 3, just like in F1 it's very difficult to overtake. Things are getting tight on the financial side now so we're restricted with the amount of testing we can do but nevertheless, I'm hopeful that by Oulton Park we can make some progress in that area. I think people back in India forget he's only 20 and they need to give him time to develop - two years ago he didn't know how to drive in the rain and this weekend he was one of the best !"

Karun who is backed by JK Tyres, the TATA Group, Kingfisher, Madhouse, UCAL Mikuni and Parx has his next race at Oulton Park in 3 weeks time.