Jamie Chadwick DMAX Round 1

22nd February marked the first round of the Jamie Chadwick Karting series at Daytona - starting at Daytona Milton Keynes. The best way to sum up my entry into this series is... all the gear - no idea!

It took a bit of convincing to the organisers to let me go in for the DMAX class, I ended up entering on the promise that if I was too slow and a moving chicane at the back - I wouldn't re enter for round 2!

In the average sodi rental karts I can hold my own against the general public, but I knew going into this I was

1. Going to be in DMAX karts, completely different to sodis.

2.I was going to be going up against a grid full of girls who kart regularly in DMAX's at the Daytona tracks.

Basically in summary, I wasn't holding out much hope - this was compounded on the day when it spend the morning raining and the track was going from fully wet to partly damp by the end of the session. I'd driven Daytona Milton Keynes once previous, and been in the DMAX karts once also.

Round 1 was run with a 12 min practice, 2 x 8 min heats and finished with a 12min final gridded by the combined results of the 2 heats.

Practice

Practice was interesting, I think I managed to spin out in every single corner at some point, desperately trying to get to grips with the braking on the karts, the best wet line and how to try and combat understeer without just doing full on drifting round every corner. I ended up P11 out of 16 in practice with a time of 1:33.142... a whopping 7.864s off the pace of the front runner.

Heat #1

The grid was pulled randomly, and would reverse for heat 2. I can't remember where I started, somewhere middle back of field, but I ended up finishing P9 out of the 16 with a best lap time of 1:29.758, the track was still wet, but not as wet as practice. I quickly worked out that in these conditions the best thing I could do was to just keep the kart facing the right way and the chances were overtakes would come to me through other people ended up the wrong way and/or in the barrier! I was still 6.4 ish seconds off the pace of the front runners, but P9 won me some points so I was happy!

Heat #2

I started 3rd on the grid for heat 2, probably the highest I'll start all year! We had to restart the race after the original start due to some confusion by some racers on how the rolling starts work. I knew I had a lot of quicker drivers behind me gunning to get past, and I learned quickly going into turn 2 as I got shunted sidewards that contact to get past on the starts is apparently okay! I ended the race P7 with a quickest lap time of 1:24.069 and I had a lot of fun battling some of the drivers. I think I held onto a few places by finding that a dry line was coming through on a couple of the corners and it was allowing me to keep a nice gap between me and P8 behind me.

Final Race

Best lap time 1:17.066 and P10 finish. In hindsight I was far too conservative with what was now a much drier, albeit still damp track. I had one near spin at the bottom of the straight, but courtesy of a t bone by the driver behind they actually knocked me back on line to carry on up the straight. I was still 6s off the front runners by lap time and getting pretty frustrated at my apparent lack of ability to drive the karts in wet conditions!

Overall I really enjoyed the experience and was extremely relieved not to be a moving chicane for everyone at the back of the field! I also discovered that 10kg of ballast is deceptively heavy to carry!