Geri passes his ARKS test!
20th August:
Best laid plans eh? We called Rye House to try and book an ARKS test for next Saturday (23rd August) only to find that they were not running any more tests on a Saturday until 18th October! That's no good, the year will all be over by then. They did say we could book a 1-2-1 lesson for Geri followed by a test (don't even ask how expensive) but this could only be on a week day, and getting Geri to Rye House with his kart on a weekday means a day off work. Once again, it was Aiden at Rogue Racing who came to the rescue. He had already suggested Geri might like to test at Whilton Mill and that he would take Geri's kart over and keep an eye on him if we could get him there. When we told him we couldn't get Geri's ARKS test booked, he said he would ask at Whilton Mill to see if Geri could take one there.
Geri was a bit worried about this, he has never seen the circuit at Whilton Mill and now we wanted him to be tested there, to achieve decent lap times there. We told him there was nothing to worry about, and to carry on learning his flags!
By the time Geri was ready to venture out onto the Whilton Mill circuit for the first time, it was raining. Raining enough to need wets - and a quick trip to the circuit shop to buy a wet suit, and a set of wheel spacers as Geri's wets sit on narrower wheels than his slicks. Aiden had also set up Geri's new Mtchron lap timer so it would read correctly at the circuit. This would give us better lap time accuracy than the stop watch we had been using.
Geri went out on track and got in 8 laps during the wet, spinning off only the once while all around him were spinning everywhere. Of course he wasn't going so quickly as he had to learn the circuit, but still recorded a lap of 71 seconds in this wet session. As the rain stopped, Geri was put back on slicks for three more sessions, and his times came down again, first he was running in the 60-61 second bracket, then into the 59s before recording a string of 58s in his final session. What we hadn't told Geri was that he was doing his ARKS test, his final session was the one being assessed. His times were more than quick enough, that Cadet pace at Whilton Mill is around 54 seconds, ARKS needs consistent laps within 110% of that, so around 60s and the examiner judged his lines to be good and his technique very smooth. He went off to do the written test, got all 10 flags correct (he had been practising for the last 4 days) and scored 9/10 (8 is the pass mark) on the general questions which were harder to coach. So Geri is now a real racing driver!
We had hoped to squeeze in a race this weekend at Whilton Mill, but they were fully booked so he is going to have to wait until 7th September for the meeting at Rye House. That does at least give us two more weeks to fully prepare, get the trailer electrics working, apply for Geri's licence, join the Hoddesdon Kart Club, sort out a racing number (we have asked for 50) and no doubt a million and one other things. A quick trip over to GPR Motorsport Equipment over at Silverstone sorted a new rule-compliant Bell helmet, and we already have a transponder ready to fit. We weighed Geri and the kart last weekend and need to buy about 10kgs of ballast to bring him up to weight - and then we think we are almost ready.
Going to be a busy weekend in September, Geri has the Grand Prix at Rogue Racing on the Saturday morning,, then ideally we need to get over to Rye House in the afternoon for some testing ready for the Sunday morning. We shall have to see if we can get over before that for another test session too so Geri has some chance of being competitive.
