A couple of quick points before we get going:
1) For those of you that just want to read the tickling bits, I’d suggest skipping straight to part 2 as there ain’t any in part 1.
2) The first 5 paragraphs below are absolutely true and accurate, and frankly give a pretty good indication of why this may not be up to my usual standards. See what you think.
Bring me back to life - Part 1
I’ve always thought that there’s some kind of cosmic joke going on that us mere mortals aren’t in on, and after the events of the last few weeks I think I can pretty much prove it.
It’s about mid-April and frankly the year to this point had been less than fun. Work had gone insane, giving fifty hour weeks on a regular basis and usually involving some form of weekend work on top, money was tight and it seemed I’d been acting as a combination of psychiatrist and dogsbody for everyone in a 100 mile radius. Then, to cap it all off, I wake up one morning to find a friend of my flatmate in an extremely bad way and a suicide note in the living room.
The next few days were, by and large, the closest thing I’ve ever gotten to experiencing hell, desperately trying to keep everything and everyone together long enough to sort things out, while not being able to get away from work owing to deadlines. In four days I got a grand total of eight hours sleep and was just about ready to drop when we finally got everything settled down and I could finally crawl into my own bed to try and recover over the weekend.
And yet, somehow, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I tried I’d wake up only minutes later, sweating and shaking as my mind started replaying what had happened, or worse, what could have happened if things had worked out slightly differently. Nothing seemed to make it any better, and I ended up resorting to a trip to my doctor and some sleeping tablets to knock me out.
I don’t think I’ve ever been that low before, and I sincerely hope I never am again. It was like looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, you can see everything you would normally, but somehow it’s all held at arms length, sounds seem muted and flat, colours washed out slightly and you just can’t concentrate on anything for long. It’s a horrible feeling, and one that try as I might, I simply couldn’t break out of without help. Fortunately, that help was closer than I realised.
About a week later our company won a huge contract with a national company, putting us about 300% over our targets for the full year and pretty much guaranteeing our continued employment. As a reward the company decided to hire out a local go-kart track for an evening and organise some friendly competition for those that wanted to drive. Those that didn’t could spend the evening propping up the upstairs bar and watching the rest of us ripping round the track.
Normally such an event would have had me jumping for joy, I’ve been driving karts for about five years off and on, and love the freedom and sheer fun you get with this most basic form of motor racing. Frankly though, I really wasn’t in the mood for it, and decided not to go for fear of bringing everyone else’s evening crashing down. And then fate got in the way.
The plan was to run teams of two people, and to match rookies up with experienced drivers in order to even the playing field as much as possible and give each team a fair chance. Yes, it was only a friendly competition, but when has that ever mattered on these sort of events? After everyone had signed up they found they were one experienced driver short, and when someone noticed my name wasn’t on the list I was pretty much doomed.
So it was that I ended up at the track and feeling more than a little overdressed for the occasion. While this particular kart centre was excellent when it came to equipment rental, race suits and all the other paraphernalia that goes with any form of racing, I’d been to far too many places that weren’t exactly up to the same standard and had long ago bought my own kit. My current kit was about a year old, and had a couple of touches that were definitely not standard on most race suits, with a large white logo splashed on the back of the black fabric reading “Birth, School, Metallica, Death” being the most obvious. The helmet too was on the flashy side, being a full race replica motorbike helmet in Carl Fogarty Red and Blue, complete with the Foggy / No Fear eyes staring out the back.
Now this may sound like overkill, and I’ll admit that some of it was, but there is a reason for doing this sort of thing. When you spend a lot of time at centres where they loan equipment similar to yours out, you need to make sure that there can be no arguments over whose kit is whose when you’re trying to leave. Hence the need for bright, patterned helmets and distinctive overalls, gloves and boots.
It was a pretty good indication of my state of mind that I hadn’t even asked who I was going to be teaming with before turning up, and in retrospect it was probably a good thing I didn’t or I may have chickened out of the whole thing. Mary was, not to put too fine a point on it, stunning. About five six, blonde, slim with a sense of humour that was infectious and a face that belonged on magazine covers I was never quite sure why she worked for us rather than modelling, and frankly had never quite had the courage to ask. She’d started work a few months after me, and in the five years since we’d become friends, though not to the degree that I’d have liked. And now I was going to be spending the evening as her teammate, which I had to admit didn’t seem like a bad option at that moment.
Whoever had picked out her race suit had done a hell of a job, and it was the first time I’d ever thought of one of the padded jumpsuits as sexy. The same deep black as mine, but without the fading and battle scars, it hugged her figure perfectly, to the point that it almost looked a size too small for her. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail so as not to get in the way of her helmet and the front zipper on the suit was pulled low enough to be verging on the illegal side of decency. Not that I was complaining, frankly it was all I could do to keep my mind from wandering off into scenarios that had nothing whatsoever to do with racing.
The next half hour or so was hectic to put it mildly. There were twelve teams and the centre had enough karts for everyone to be on track at once for a warm up session. All the experienced drivers were given a couple of laps on their own to get used to the circuit and learn which way it went, then the rookies were let out of the pits to start getting the hang of driving these buzz bombs.
Driving a kart is a unique experience, and a very fun one if you’re any good at it. There are no gears to worry about, and the kart itself is basically four slick tyres connected to a steel frame with a small motorbike engine mounted at the back and a seat in the middle barely an inch off the ground. The whole thing is about four foot long and the full professional ones can easily get up to 100mph given enough track. As these weren’t professional karts, and it was an indoor track, the most they could do was about 50mph, although reaching that would require some serious commitment around this circuit. Even so it feels much faster as there’s no bodywork around you other that the steel floor of the kart and you feel like there’s nothing separating you from the tarmac. Add in rear wheel drive, front wheel steering and lock-to-lock steering of about half a turn each way and you’ve got a vehicle that loves going sideways and is tremendous fun to just throw about.
It was fascinating to watch, with each team seemingly taking a different approach to this ‘training’ session. Some of the experienced drivers just headed off into the distance, trying to improve on their own lap times as quickly as possible to ensure that they wouldn’t look silly in their own races and ignoring their partners completely. Others went around behind their rookie for a lap or two, then dove back into the pits, pointed out what they were doing wrong and then back out to try again.
We went for a different approach to everyone else, and it seemed to be working quite nicely. I’d follow Mary around for a lap or two, then dive ahead of her on a straight and try to drive a lap within her ability but a second or two quicker than she had been going while she followed me around. Then we’d swap again and repeat the process. The net result was at the end of the practice session we’d racked up more track time than anyone else, and Mary was comfortably the fastest of the rookies. I was only about mid-pack of the experienced drivers but I knew I hadn’t really put in a fast time yet, so wasn’t too worried.
Once we arrived back in the pits and pulled off the helmets I suddenly realised something odd had happened. I don’t know when exactly, but somewhere in that session my mood had changed completely and everything had snapped back into focus. I really did have no idea what caused it, but rapidly decided not to question it and just hope it lasted.
The racing itself was relatively straightforward. There’d be one race for the rookies, then one for the experienced drivers followed by an endurance race of 30 laps were each driver had to do at least ten laps. Once that was done there’d be four mixed races, with a random selection of entrants so everyone did two of the four races. The team with the most points at the end won, simple as that.
Except it wasn’t. Unknown to me, there was a lot more going on in the competition stakes than had been announced. Specifically Mary had put her own pride on the line rather heavily with a side bet with our receptionist, a lass called Bonnie who was only a fraction less stunning than Mary and definitely a good choice as the ‘first impression’ for the company. It was a simple enough bet, whichever of the two finished lower on the leader board would be placed in a cage during the planned ‘after event party’ and have to do anything the crowd asked of her. In all fairness most of the people in our company were pretty good sports about this sort of thing, and realistically nothing too x rated would happen, but still it wasn’t the sort of bet you’d try and lose.
The problem was that Mary hadn’t counted on the fact that Bonnie had decided to stack the deck slightly in two ways. First, she’d been down to the track a couple of days earlier and had gone out on a rather lengthy practice session with one of the circuit regulars to learn her way around. Second, and probably far more important, was that her partner, Rob, was not only her boyfriend, but a regular racer at this circuit who knew every inch of the track and had more laps round the place than everyone else put together. As a result he was almost five seconds faster than everyone else and had a definite air of smugness that was getting just a touch irritating.
The races started a few minutes later and the work we’d put in paid off immediately as Mary managed to edge Bonnie out by about half a second for the win in a race that was, frankly, Mary and Bonnie in one class and everyone else trailing behind them by a considerable distance. For my first race I’d been given a mid-grid position for the start, with Rob starting from pole position. I managed to get through the pack and into second place by the end of lap 2, but there simply wasn’t enough time to claw back the advantage he’d gained from having a clear track ahead of him in the remaining 8 laps and we were tied going into the endurance race.
Endurance races are a totally different experience from a normal race, and require far more strategy. While we didn’t have to take on fuel at any point in this race, we did have to make at least one pit stop to swap drivers as we each had to do at least 10 of the 30 laps or be disqualified. The problem comes in how you split the other ten laps, and in who drives which section of the race. Theoretically anyway it would be quicker to let the experienced drivers take the first 20 laps, get a gap and then dive in to let the rookie finish the race and hope that you’ve built up enough of a safety margin with the experienced driver to win. The problem is, if everyone does the same thing there’s usually the potential to get stuck behind someone for a while, or worse get caught up in someone else’s accident, and blow the whole race by not giving enough of a gap to your partner.
So we decided to try something a bit different and completely ignored the playbook. The luck of the draw placed us in pole position for the race, and with barely seconds to go before heading out onto the circuit we decided that Mary would start the race. With a picture perfect start she was into the first corner in first, and then started driving defensively. For four laps she kept the entire field at bay through a combination of good driving, some outright brave late breaking manoeuvres that I’d have probably let the other guy through on and some slightly suspect, but within the rules, blocking.
As she came over the finish line for lap five Rob finally managed to barge his way through and started to edge away. Right on cue Mary dove into the pits, a quick swap over later and I was back on track, surprisingly enough not in last place as Mary’s run had been quite sensational and managed to drop me back in the race just ahead of the slower runners at the back and with a nice clear track to get back to the leading pack.
The plan was simple enough, we now had an additional four laps from the point that everyone else had to come in and change drivers for me to get enough of a gap that we could get away with making another pit stop and still get Mary back out in the lead. The next 15 laps were the hardest I’d ever driven, right on the limit of what the kart could do, but at the end of lap 19 I was sitting right on Rob’s gearbox, and in no hurry to pass him, knowing he had to pit in on this lap or be kicked out of the results. Sure enough, he shot down the pit lane and all I could see ahead was clear tarmac.
By now I was flying, having built a nice smooth rhythm and was putting in laps that were only a few tenths slower than the lap record. By the time I headed in to make our last driver change, we had a good forty-five seconds over the rest of the pack, with a stop taking about twenty. The change went smoothly and Mary headed back out to do the last laps in relative comfort for the win. It really was the perfect example of tactics winning a race, and Bonnie and Rob were really not happy about it as they’d thought they were a sure thing to get the win.
The mixed races though were a different story, with Mary managing a superb fourth in the first, where I could only manage second in a race I should have won if a back marker hadn’t pulled across my nose on the way into a corner. I was furious with myself for that mistake, but that was replaced a few minutes later by outrage as Rob deliberately knocked Mary off the track as she tried to overtake him when he got completely the wrong line into the hairpin. The marshals seemed to agree, and Rob got a ten second penalty, dropping him right to the back of the pack and letting Mary manage a brilliant third while he could only manage a distant sixth.
The maths was simple enough now, only two teams could win, and it was down to whichever one of me and Rob crossed the finish line first in the last race. We were both sitting on the front row of the grid, and right from the off we were wheel to wheel all the way around the track. For nine laps we swapped the lead, sometimes as many as ten times a lap, each bend seemingly giving a new leader. No one else was with us; it was going to be a straight race for the line between the two of us for the overall win.
Through the uphill section and across the bridge I was in front, then he managed to get outside me on the downhill run to the hairpin, and he just turned right across me. Thankfully I saw it coming and backed off enough to let him through while maintaining something like my normal speed. Down the first straight, left and onto the main straight, flat out through the little right left kink and down to the ninety degree left hand turn onto the back straight we went, neither of us lifting off the gas pedal. He backed off slightly for the bend, and with my heart firmly wedged in my mouth I kept my foot welded to the throttle pedal. The back squirmed, slid slightly, and then we were through and racing down to the final part of the track side-by-side.
Into another left, then hauling the karts down to take the almost 180 degree bend and onto another short straight, still running alongside each other. Through a vicious right-hander, then up to another gentle left, still side-by-side. A short straight, then a left-right chicane and the finish line, with only enough room for one of us to get through. I had the inside line to the left turn though, and simply decided not to brake at all, turning in early to cut his nose off and force him to back off. I waited for the sound of metal on metal, but it never came and I was clear and across the finish line to take the chequered flag. I glanced back down the track, and saw Rob a god twenty yards back and shaking, having had to hit the brake pedal to the floor through the last chicane as he’d got it completely wrong in the left hand turn, making my block unnecessary. Not that I cared, I was simply on a high from what had, without question, been one of the best races I’d ever driven, a feeling that was enhanced a second or two later as my on-board computer screen showed me the LR flag next to my last lap time. A new lap record, a race win, and the honour of a good friend protected, not a bad evenings work all things considered.
1) For those of you that just want to read the tickling bits, I’d suggest skipping straight to part 2 as there ain’t any in part 1.
2) The first 5 paragraphs below are absolutely true and accurate, and frankly give a pretty good indication of why this may not be up to my usual standards. See what you think.
Bring me back to life - Part 1
I’ve always thought that there’s some kind of cosmic joke going on that us mere mortals aren’t in on, and after the events of the last few weeks I think I can pretty much prove it.
It’s about mid-April and frankly the year to this point had been less than fun. Work had gone insane, giving fifty hour weeks on a regular basis and usually involving some form of weekend work on top, money was tight and it seemed I’d been acting as a combination of psychiatrist and dogsbody for everyone in a 100 mile radius. Then, to cap it all off, I wake up one morning to find a friend of my flatmate in an extremely bad way and a suicide note in the living room.
The next few days were, by and large, the closest thing I’ve ever gotten to experiencing hell, desperately trying to keep everything and everyone together long enough to sort things out, while not being able to get away from work owing to deadlines. In four days I got a grand total of eight hours sleep and was just about ready to drop when we finally got everything settled down and I could finally crawl into my own bed to try and recover over the weekend.
And yet, somehow, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I tried I’d wake up only minutes later, sweating and shaking as my mind started replaying what had happened, or worse, what could have happened if things had worked out slightly differently. Nothing seemed to make it any better, and I ended up resorting to a trip to my doctor and some sleeping tablets to knock me out.
I don’t think I’ve ever been that low before, and I sincerely hope I never am again. It was like looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, you can see everything you would normally, but somehow it’s all held at arms length, sounds seem muted and flat, colours washed out slightly and you just can’t concentrate on anything for long. It’s a horrible feeling, and one that try as I might, I simply couldn’t break out of without help. Fortunately, that help was closer than I realised.
About a week later our company won a huge contract with a national company, putting us about 300% over our targets for the full year and pretty much guaranteeing our continued employment. As a reward the company decided to hire out a local go-kart track for an evening and organise some friendly competition for those that wanted to drive. Those that didn’t could spend the evening propping up the upstairs bar and watching the rest of us ripping round the track.
Normally such an event would have had me jumping for joy, I’ve been driving karts for about five years off and on, and love the freedom and sheer fun you get with this most basic form of motor racing. Frankly though, I really wasn’t in the mood for it, and decided not to go for fear of bringing everyone else’s evening crashing down. And then fate got in the way.
The plan was to run teams of two people, and to match rookies up with experienced drivers in order to even the playing field as much as possible and give each team a fair chance. Yes, it was only a friendly competition, but when has that ever mattered on these sort of events? After everyone had signed up they found they were one experienced driver short, and when someone noticed my name wasn’t on the list I was pretty much doomed.
So it was that I ended up at the track and feeling more than a little overdressed for the occasion. While this particular kart centre was excellent when it came to equipment rental, race suits and all the other paraphernalia that goes with any form of racing, I’d been to far too many places that weren’t exactly up to the same standard and had long ago bought my own kit. My current kit was about a year old, and had a couple of touches that were definitely not standard on most race suits, with a large white logo splashed on the back of the black fabric reading “Birth, School, Metallica, Death” being the most obvious. The helmet too was on the flashy side, being a full race replica motorbike helmet in Carl Fogarty Red and Blue, complete with the Foggy / No Fear eyes staring out the back.
Now this may sound like overkill, and I’ll admit that some of it was, but there is a reason for doing this sort of thing. When you spend a lot of time at centres where they loan equipment similar to yours out, you need to make sure that there can be no arguments over whose kit is whose when you’re trying to leave. Hence the need for bright, patterned helmets and distinctive overalls, gloves and boots.
It was a pretty good indication of my state of mind that I hadn’t even asked who I was going to be teaming with before turning up, and in retrospect it was probably a good thing I didn’t or I may have chickened out of the whole thing. Mary was, not to put too fine a point on it, stunning. About five six, blonde, slim with a sense of humour that was infectious and a face that belonged on magazine covers I was never quite sure why she worked for us rather than modelling, and frankly had never quite had the courage to ask. She’d started work a few months after me, and in the five years since we’d become friends, though not to the degree that I’d have liked. And now I was going to be spending the evening as her teammate, which I had to admit didn’t seem like a bad option at that moment.
Whoever had picked out her race suit had done a hell of a job, and it was the first time I’d ever thought of one of the padded jumpsuits as sexy. The same deep black as mine, but without the fading and battle scars, it hugged her figure perfectly, to the point that it almost looked a size too small for her. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail so as not to get in the way of her helmet and the front zipper on the suit was pulled low enough to be verging on the illegal side of decency. Not that I was complaining, frankly it was all I could do to keep my mind from wandering off into scenarios that had nothing whatsoever to do with racing.
The next half hour or so was hectic to put it mildly. There were twelve teams and the centre had enough karts for everyone to be on track at once for a warm up session. All the experienced drivers were given a couple of laps on their own to get used to the circuit and learn which way it went, then the rookies were let out of the pits to start getting the hang of driving these buzz bombs.
Driving a kart is a unique experience, and a very fun one if you’re any good at it. There are no gears to worry about, and the kart itself is basically four slick tyres connected to a steel frame with a small motorbike engine mounted at the back and a seat in the middle barely an inch off the ground. The whole thing is about four foot long and the full professional ones can easily get up to 100mph given enough track. As these weren’t professional karts, and it was an indoor track, the most they could do was about 50mph, although reaching that would require some serious commitment around this circuit. Even so it feels much faster as there’s no bodywork around you other that the steel floor of the kart and you feel like there’s nothing separating you from the tarmac. Add in rear wheel drive, front wheel steering and lock-to-lock steering of about half a turn each way and you’ve got a vehicle that loves going sideways and is tremendous fun to just throw about.
It was fascinating to watch, with each team seemingly taking a different approach to this ‘training’ session. Some of the experienced drivers just headed off into the distance, trying to improve on their own lap times as quickly as possible to ensure that they wouldn’t look silly in their own races and ignoring their partners completely. Others went around behind their rookie for a lap or two, then dove back into the pits, pointed out what they were doing wrong and then back out to try again.
We went for a different approach to everyone else, and it seemed to be working quite nicely. I’d follow Mary around for a lap or two, then dive ahead of her on a straight and try to drive a lap within her ability but a second or two quicker than she had been going while she followed me around. Then we’d swap again and repeat the process. The net result was at the end of the practice session we’d racked up more track time than anyone else, and Mary was comfortably the fastest of the rookies. I was only about mid-pack of the experienced drivers but I knew I hadn’t really put in a fast time yet, so wasn’t too worried.
Once we arrived back in the pits and pulled off the helmets I suddenly realised something odd had happened. I don’t know when exactly, but somewhere in that session my mood had changed completely and everything had snapped back into focus. I really did have no idea what caused it, but rapidly decided not to question it and just hope it lasted.
The racing itself was relatively straightforward. There’d be one race for the rookies, then one for the experienced drivers followed by an endurance race of 30 laps were each driver had to do at least ten laps. Once that was done there’d be four mixed races, with a random selection of entrants so everyone did two of the four races. The team with the most points at the end won, simple as that.
Except it wasn’t. Unknown to me, there was a lot more going on in the competition stakes than had been announced. Specifically Mary had put her own pride on the line rather heavily with a side bet with our receptionist, a lass called Bonnie who was only a fraction less stunning than Mary and definitely a good choice as the ‘first impression’ for the company. It was a simple enough bet, whichever of the two finished lower on the leader board would be placed in a cage during the planned ‘after event party’ and have to do anything the crowd asked of her. In all fairness most of the people in our company were pretty good sports about this sort of thing, and realistically nothing too x rated would happen, but still it wasn’t the sort of bet you’d try and lose.
The problem was that Mary hadn’t counted on the fact that Bonnie had decided to stack the deck slightly in two ways. First, she’d been down to the track a couple of days earlier and had gone out on a rather lengthy practice session with one of the circuit regulars to learn her way around. Second, and probably far more important, was that her partner, Rob, was not only her boyfriend, but a regular racer at this circuit who knew every inch of the track and had more laps round the place than everyone else put together. As a result he was almost five seconds faster than everyone else and had a definite air of smugness that was getting just a touch irritating.
The races started a few minutes later and the work we’d put in paid off immediately as Mary managed to edge Bonnie out by about half a second for the win in a race that was, frankly, Mary and Bonnie in one class and everyone else trailing behind them by a considerable distance. For my first race I’d been given a mid-grid position for the start, with Rob starting from pole position. I managed to get through the pack and into second place by the end of lap 2, but there simply wasn’t enough time to claw back the advantage he’d gained from having a clear track ahead of him in the remaining 8 laps and we were tied going into the endurance race.
Endurance races are a totally different experience from a normal race, and require far more strategy. While we didn’t have to take on fuel at any point in this race, we did have to make at least one pit stop to swap drivers as we each had to do at least 10 of the 30 laps or be disqualified. The problem comes in how you split the other ten laps, and in who drives which section of the race. Theoretically anyway it would be quicker to let the experienced drivers take the first 20 laps, get a gap and then dive in to let the rookie finish the race and hope that you’ve built up enough of a safety margin with the experienced driver to win. The problem is, if everyone does the same thing there’s usually the potential to get stuck behind someone for a while, or worse get caught up in someone else’s accident, and blow the whole race by not giving enough of a gap to your partner.
So we decided to try something a bit different and completely ignored the playbook. The luck of the draw placed us in pole position for the race, and with barely seconds to go before heading out onto the circuit we decided that Mary would start the race. With a picture perfect start she was into the first corner in first, and then started driving defensively. For four laps she kept the entire field at bay through a combination of good driving, some outright brave late breaking manoeuvres that I’d have probably let the other guy through on and some slightly suspect, but within the rules, blocking.
As she came over the finish line for lap five Rob finally managed to barge his way through and started to edge away. Right on cue Mary dove into the pits, a quick swap over later and I was back on track, surprisingly enough not in last place as Mary’s run had been quite sensational and managed to drop me back in the race just ahead of the slower runners at the back and with a nice clear track to get back to the leading pack.
The plan was simple enough, we now had an additional four laps from the point that everyone else had to come in and change drivers for me to get enough of a gap that we could get away with making another pit stop and still get Mary back out in the lead. The next 15 laps were the hardest I’d ever driven, right on the limit of what the kart could do, but at the end of lap 19 I was sitting right on Rob’s gearbox, and in no hurry to pass him, knowing he had to pit in on this lap or be kicked out of the results. Sure enough, he shot down the pit lane and all I could see ahead was clear tarmac.
By now I was flying, having built a nice smooth rhythm and was putting in laps that were only a few tenths slower than the lap record. By the time I headed in to make our last driver change, we had a good forty-five seconds over the rest of the pack, with a stop taking about twenty. The change went smoothly and Mary headed back out to do the last laps in relative comfort for the win. It really was the perfect example of tactics winning a race, and Bonnie and Rob were really not happy about it as they’d thought they were a sure thing to get the win.
The mixed races though were a different story, with Mary managing a superb fourth in the first, where I could only manage second in a race I should have won if a back marker hadn’t pulled across my nose on the way into a corner. I was furious with myself for that mistake, but that was replaced a few minutes later by outrage as Rob deliberately knocked Mary off the track as she tried to overtake him when he got completely the wrong line into the hairpin. The marshals seemed to agree, and Rob got a ten second penalty, dropping him right to the back of the pack and letting Mary manage a brilliant third while he could only manage a distant sixth.
The maths was simple enough now, only two teams could win, and it was down to whichever one of me and Rob crossed the finish line first in the last race. We were both sitting on the front row of the grid, and right from the off we were wheel to wheel all the way around the track. For nine laps we swapped the lead, sometimes as many as ten times a lap, each bend seemingly giving a new leader. No one else was with us; it was going to be a straight race for the line between the two of us for the overall win.
Through the uphill section and across the bridge I was in front, then he managed to get outside me on the downhill run to the hairpin, and he just turned right across me. Thankfully I saw it coming and backed off enough to let him through while maintaining something like my normal speed. Down the first straight, left and onto the main straight, flat out through the little right left kink and down to the ninety degree left hand turn onto the back straight we went, neither of us lifting off the gas pedal. He backed off slightly for the bend, and with my heart firmly wedged in my mouth I kept my foot welded to the throttle pedal. The back squirmed, slid slightly, and then we were through and racing down to the final part of the track side-by-side.
Into another left, then hauling the karts down to take the almost 180 degree bend and onto another short straight, still running alongside each other. Through a vicious right-hander, then up to another gentle left, still side-by-side. A short straight, then a left-right chicane and the finish line, with only enough room for one of us to get through. I had the inside line to the left turn though, and simply decided not to brake at all, turning in early to cut his nose off and force him to back off. I waited for the sound of metal on metal, but it never came and I was clear and across the finish line to take the chequered flag. I glanced back down the track, and saw Rob a god twenty yards back and shaking, having had to hit the brake pedal to the floor through the last chicane as he’d got it completely wrong in the left hand turn, making my block unnecessary. Not that I cared, I was simply on a high from what had, without question, been one of the best races I’d ever driven, a feeling that was enhanced a second or two later as my on-board computer screen showed me the LR flag next to my last lap time. A new lap record, a race win, and the honour of a good friend protected, not a bad evenings work all things considered.
