I think that anyone who was there will fully understand the title of this item. Great weekends racing but with the length of races and schedule the weekend seemed to drag and the fact that the first race on Sunday for Juniors was not until nearly midday made the entire weekend feel slow.

First weekend of the 2009 Rotax engine in juniors proved to be interesting and testing for mechanics and drivers alike. Gearing, jetting, needles, carbs you name it all needed changing and all of those lovely settings gained from years of the same thing were out of the window.

At one point i discovered that we were running a 145 jet at the same time others who normally run much leaner than us were running 162, but with a massive amount of assistance from JSR and Steve Ogden via the phone we finally hit a setting that worked, it was not until the final that we even started to unleash the power of this new engine, in that one race we took 0.7 off our previous best and i am sure if we had hit this on Saturday we would have been very close to the front. In the end 41.40 was the best lap and we had a best rolling lap of a 41.9 so we also took a giant stride toward bridging the gap to the front.

Starting 15th in the final after an excursion into the grass in heat one left no place to finish other than last and a heat 2 with reverse grids and our motor running like a W60 rather than a Rotax meant 2 wasted heats. The pre-final was an improvement and was the first time we matched our time from the previous month with the old engine but still only finishing in 15th showed we were just not getting the power we should.

Then we hit it, it’s all in the carb, the kart was pulling out of the slow corners like a train and with a lower gear we would have been awesome on the straights. As it was we were the biggest movers in the final from 15th to 9th and after 3 laps of a Mansell/Senna Monaco style battle with Cameron all over the back of 8th he had one last run out of the last corner to finish in 9th by 0.03.

Bring on Shennington on Friday for Practice and Whilton in 2 weeks for a race at a track we know well.

We will be welcoming 3 new members into the team at Whilton this month, a young lady who resides in Spain and a brother and sister cadet team. All 4 will be running Tony karts, 3 x 09's (2 cadet and an EVR) and an 08 jnr Rotax with an 09 engine.