Thomas Gray's first Championships meeting of the year is planned to take place at the Rye House Kart Track 01-07-2012. It’s been a very busy schedule getting all the equipment prepared in time and Thomas settled with his new chassis and engine and everyone is very excited to finally get back to the serious business of racing again, a full report of Thomas's weekend will be uploaded shortly after the event.....

Testing 30th June 2012

   Today was a very successful test session; Tom was immediately on the pace of the front runners even after his ten months of not racing, also taking into account he has now moved up to a class with much bigger chassis and a much more powerful engine.

   Session one started with a general ‘shaking down’ of the new chassis and carful monitoring of the engine, initial running showed everything to be in order and so we could press ahead with setting up the chassis, into session two with everything re-set we decided to start at the back and see how we were in the pecking order, the kart was handling well but Tom was clearly not as smooth as he usually is so we decided to examine the geometry settings on the front of the kart, it soon become apparent that there was a problem on the front left as even with making adjustments we could not get the geometry within its required setting, with some careful checking it was discovered the stub axle was bent and this was the root cause of the problem.

  With everything brought into specification we set of again for our Third test session the adjustments had clearly worked as Tom was back to his usual very smooth driving style and lapping extremely quickly, clearly one of the fastest on the circuit at that point and impressing many people who were observing his driving. The last session before lunch we decided to make final small adjustments to tyre pressures just to help the overall balance of the kart even with very worn slick tyres that we were using Tom was just getting quicker and quicker, having decided that it was probably best to just get some good running time in we decided to leave any further set up changes until race day.

  For the afternoon sessions we started Tom further up towards the front of the grid to get some accurate comparisons with the front running teams and was not at all surprised to see he was every bit as quick as them, so to round up we head into Tom’s first race of the year tomorrow very happy with the pace so far, however racing will be a totally different experience so head into tomorrows race with a target of finishing in the top ten anything better than that will leave the team extremely proud and happy with there efforts, good luck Tom…. 

Race Day 1st July 2012

Race day report to follow .....