On a rain-hit Sunday (August
21, 2016), championship favourite Ricky Donison suffered a double blow that saw
him surrender his leadership position after the fourth and penultimate round of
the 13th JK Tyre FMSCI National Rotax Max Championship in Kolhapur’s Mohite Racing Academy.
Donison of BPC Racing, who had
won all three earlier rounds, couldn’t come to terms with the wet and slippery
conditions on the track and lost his edge in the Senior Max category. He zipped
into the parc ferme area in the scrutiny bay as he felt that he had a problem
with his kart.
He came back a few minutes
later to rejoin the race but by then the race organisers had removed his
transponder, deeming him DNF (did not finish) on technical grounds. It meant
that he had to be content with 38 points in the final that saw him slip to the
second position with 324 overall points.
Chennai’s Vishnu Prasad jumped
into the lead in the battle for the championship by finishing third in the
pre-final and fourth in the final on an action-packed day. He has a nominal
4-point lead now with 328 points in his bag, going into the final round next
month.
The round itself was won by
Mumbai’s Nayan Chatterjee (Meco Racing) in an exciting race. Starting from the sixth place, he drove
aggressively to come into contention in the opening lap itself. By the fifth,
he was in the lead and didn’t give any other driver the opportunity to catch
him.
Interestingly, the Junior Max
and Micro Max categories too saw the current leaders, Manav Sharma and Shahan
Ali, suffer defeats but that didn’t affect their positions on the championship
table.
In Junior Max, Manav of
Peregrine Racing only managed to finish sixth after struggling with technical
problems with his kart all through the weekend. But that was enough to keep him
ahead of the pack with 334 points.
Yash Aradhya of Meco won the
round to climb one place up to second position with 328 points.
In Micro Max, Shahan Ali
looked unbeatable till the rains came down. The 12-year-old from Agra preferred
not to take any undue risk and couldn’t do anything as Arjun Nair (Meco Racing)
sneaked past him in the opening lap itself.
Shahan waited for Arjun to
make a mistake but that didn’t happen; he made a late charge, even clocking the
quickest timing in the last and 15th lap but Arjun held on to his nerve and
warded him off. Bangalore’s Arjun is now just 28 points behind the leader in
the championship race.
MICRO MAX Final (15 laps)
1. Arjun Nair, Bangalore
(16:23.165); 2. Shahan Ali Mohsin, Agra (16:27.692); 3. Yeasash More, Bangalore
(16:28.345)
JUNIOR MAX Final (18 laps)
1.Yash Aradhya, Bangalore
(18:52.000); 2 Chirag Ghorpade, Bangalore (19:09.584); 3 Paul Francis,
Bangalore (19:14.258)
SENIOR MAX (15 laps) Final
1.Nayan Chatterjee, Mumbai
(20:34.842); 2 Chittesh Mandody, Kolhapur (20:40,493); 3.Akash Gowda, (20:45.403)