Round 1 of the 2010 Rotax Pro Tour kicked off in style with a cluster of new faces, as well as the old ones, arriving in Geelong on Friday for official practice. The weather was relatively fine and consistent right throughout the weekend, with strong competition across the board particularly in the developing Max DD2 class.

Two 5 minute qualifying sessions organised everyone’s starting positions for the heat races. We struck trouble in qualifying session 1 with a rear hub coming loose, so we retired to the pits.  We returned for session 2 better prepared and were quick enough for 4th place on the 2nd row of the grid.

In heat 1 we got a great start moving straight into 2nd position by turn 1 where we stayed for a couple of laps before dropping to 3rd again, and later 4th where we finished after 16 laps.

Heat 2 we struggled right from the start dropping back to as far as 9th due to a lack of top speed. We had to fight for most of the race and were only good enough to climb back to 7th position by the end of the 16 laps.

Heat 3 we got another great start and slotted into 2nd position once again, this time managing to stay there for the entire race finishing just 0.7seconds behind the leader.

On Sunday for the pre-final we again started from 4th position based off our point score from the 3 heats races.  Getting another healthy start we got into 3rd position early and managed to stay there for the remainder of the race, but battled with kart setup issues and lacking power in the motor, which was looking like it was going to hurt us in the 30 lap final.

Starting from 3rd we held our position for the first lap but dropped to 4th before dropping to 5th as our kart suffered majorly from a lack of front grip.  On lap 13 we regained 4th position but were unable to maintain it for the enduring 17 laps remaining.  We held on until the final lap but dropped to 5th again due to missing a gear just 4 corners from the chequered flag. A bit of a disappointing result in the end, but considering the problems we were having it could have been much worse.

Special thanks to all our team sponsors:  C.I.C., Deeps Engineering, Alex Lind, Superior Radiators, and to Karting World.