KARTING’S GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
The enthusiasm in Ed Murray’s voice was palpable as he described the scene from the southern tip of Italy in late November.
“You have to be here to believe it. This is the best kart meeting I’ve ever been to, it’s in another league!”, his voiced crackled over his Blackberry, from 8 000 km away.
And Ed’s been around. He started racing his home-built karts in the late 1960s, was a member of the South African 100 cc squad that did battle in Europe on numerous occasions in the ‘70s, won eight national titles as a driver in the ‘80s and ‘90s and for the past decade, Ed Murray Racing has been the official importer of Austrian-built BRP Rotax engines to South Africa.
In that time, the Rotax Max Challenge has come to dominate world karting like no other series has done since the sport was conceived as the ultimate starter pack for racing in the 1950s. Some 70 000 125 cc Rotax Max engines have been sold around the world since the series was inaugurated in 1999. The giant “recreational products” manufacturer from Linz enjoys nearly 50 per cent of the world-wide karting engine market, while its next biggest manufacturing competitor has at most a 10 per cent share. Essentially you have Rotax , and then some 200 tiny manufacturers in Europe scrapping over the other half of the karting pie.
The whole idea of the Rotax Max series is that the performance must be ze the same, ja? Thus the engines are sealed (as they are in all competing regions throughout the year), only allowed to be opened by a Rotax-appointed technician, and the chassis must be a CIK-approved item. For the Grand finals, all drivers in each class competed in identical karts, with CRG supplying chassis for Max Challenge and DD2, while the Juniors competed in SODI karts and the masters in Haase chassis.
The La Conca circuit in the “heel” of southern Italy is one of the most modern kart tracks in the world.
“It has a fantastic pit and parc ferme complex, the track itself is wide with a mix of fast sweeps, tight stuff and a couple of overtaking possibilities on each lap,” says Murray. And the sight that greeted the South African contingent as they arrived for the 2010 Rotax Grand Finals would take anyone’s breath away.
Take your pick! 252 brand new karts, lined up and ready to roll at La Conca
Lined up on the main straight were 252 brand new karts ready to race, supplied absolutely free by Rotax and the associated chassis manufacturers for the meeting. To qualify for the Grand Finals in 2010 you had to be a current champion in your region, and get yourself to the circuit ( the winners of the European and Asian Pacific championships also had automatic qualification for the event, and in some of the massive regions like Canada and America, more than one driver per class gained an entry to the finals).
After a numbers draw for your championship package, Rotax then handed you a brand new kart and engine, three sets of Mojo tyres, a karting trolley, a box of tools, a fuel allocation for the four-day event, and the rest was up to you. The idea behind this?
Close racing with absolutely equal equipment places the onus on the driver, the original Rotax success formula.
The structure of the meeting for 2010 would see 252 karters from 55 countries compete in four classes – Max Challenge, Junior Max, DD2 gearbox and DD2 Masters. And bear in mind that each of these drivers was a champion in their country, having fought tooth and nail to earn the right for a place of the grid. To say the competition in a Grand Final is fierce is like saying that Ferrari has a degree of charisma in the world of petrol-hedonism.
“To give you an idea of how well the formula works, you only have to look at the qualifying times for the DD2 gearbox class final,” says Murray. “A mere 0,7 seconds separated the top 60 drivers!”
To do well in this kind of arena takes a mixture of supreme skill, chassis set-up ability, an ability to stay calm in the pressure cooker of all pressure cookers, and, well, luck.
Our South African drivers all did well, with Mathew Swanepoel (SA Junior Max champ) ending up 29th in his class, DD2 Masters champ s Gary Marais placing 17th and Marc Murray (Ed’s son) 11th in DD2 Gearbox.
But The Man, as far as us South Africans are concerned, was young Caleb Williams, a 17-year-old matric student at Boksburg CBC, who won the Rotax Max Challenge class after starting the final in 32ndt place on the grid!
“Caleb is a driver that gets up very early in the morning,” says Ed with a proud smile. “His focus throughout a race weekend was amazing. He was always in the top five during his qualification and elimination heats, with the exception of his pre-final, where he suffered a puncture after four laps.
“ This meant he started at the back. In the first few corners of the final there were some huge prangs and Caleb didn’t hesitate, he drove straight through them! By the end of the first lap, after starting 32nd, he was ninth!
“He then settled down to picking off a few drivers per lap, so that he took the lead on lap 15 and he never lost it. By finishing well. but not in front, all through the elimination heats he knew where the overtaking spots were. And because he was knocked out early in the pre-final he started the final with tyres that were a bit fresher than his competitors, as they’d only done about four laps going into the race.
“He was superb. Luck? Ja, I guess he had some, he could have been tagged in those crashes, but he never hesitated. And remember, in 2009 he won the DD2 class at the World Finals, so essentially he has won three South African titles and two world titles in the past three years in karting. That’s not luck!”