British Cadet Championships, Rd.4, at Glan Y' Gors
Jonny recovered from a troubled opening Heat to pull off an astonishing double win in Sundays two Finals. He has now won five out of eight S1 finals this year and, under the old points scoring system, would be well on his way to securing the title. As things stand, however, his championship lead has been halved to just three points over Dexter Patterson.
It all went disastrously wrong for him early on Saturday afternoon when he was shunted off the circuit while lying in 3rd place. Although he managed to restart his kart, this incident dropped Jonny down to 16th position and cost him 15 valuable points. After reviewing camera footage of this incident, it was decided to dock the offending driver a full lap.
This wasn’t much help to Jonny who started Sunday’s first final off grid 8. Instead of leading the championship by six points, he was now nine behind Patterson. He made an excellent start and completed the opening lap in 3rd spot, some 20 yards behind race leader Patterson. After two laps, he’d moved up to 2nd place and almost immediately went into 1st spot, pulling Joseph Taylor along with him. These two quickly opened up a huge lead over the rest. Dexter Patterson finished the race back in 6th place behind Owen Marlow, Klaas Kooiker and Harry Thompson.
Final 1 had been run in wet conditions but the circuit quickly dried out in time for Final 2. Dexter’s championship lead had been cut back to a single point. On this occasion Jonny made a sluggish getaway and Joseph Taylor took an immediate lead with Patterson leaping into 3rd place. As they came round to complete their 3rd lap, Dexter made a lunge for 2nd position and Jonny found himself forced onto the grass. He dropped down to 7th place before managing to clean his tyres. At this point he was some 30 yards behind Patterson who had overtaken Taylor for the lead.
Jonny patiently began to close the gap and took over 1st spot with four laps still remaining. He then went into safety mode, although there was one heart stopping moment when he caught up with a back-marker on the very last corner. Taylor managed to take 2nd place from Patterson towards the end.
“Jonny showed a lot of character to recover from Saturday’s disappointment in the best possible way,” said Justin. “What looked like being a disastrous round for us has turned out ok, although it still equals Jonny’s lowest score of the year. That’s how important the Heats now are . ”
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