Rain, Red Flags and Rivals deny Kasper his first podium
Round 2 of the BARC Formula Renault Championship began with a dry day of testing at Silverstone, home circuit of Kaspers new team, Antel Motorsport.
After taking a few laps to get used to the new car, Kasper quickly became comfortable and began to set a very competitive pace, one which would have put him in the top four runners.
Team Manager Ross Curnow was immediately impressed;
“We very much enjoyed working with Kasper. He has a very good technical understanding of what the car should be doing and how he should be getting the best out of it. He responded very well to directions we gave him and as a result we made fantastic progress on Friday. We were unlucky that a red flag ruined his new tyre run, but the data clearly showed that we were genuinely quick.”
Much to the disappointment of the team, Saturday’s qualifying sessions were both wet. Kaspers limited experience in the rain meant that the day was always going to be difficult.
During the first session, Kasper was struggling with the car and conditions, finishing a very disappointing 13th.
After much work with his engineer to improve the car for the second sessions, Kasper went out and immediately felt more comfortable. He completed 5 laps on a damp circuit, all of which were hampered by heavy traffic. The red flag then came out, and as the cars sat in the pit lane waiting for the session to be restarted, disaster struck! The rain began to fall very heavily, meaning lap times would be slowed by around 3 seconds, and because Kasper had been held up on all 5 of his laps when the circuit was drier, he was again only sat in 13th place. On the wetter circuit Kasper was lapping 4th quickest, but unfortunately it was too late.
So with a lot of wor
k to do after a frustrating qualifying, Kasper would need to show good race craft on Sunday to make his way through the pack. With the circuit now dry for race day, Kasper made good progress from the very start. As was the case during Friday testing, Kasper was again extremely quick in the dry. He quickly made his way up to 8th position, and was back to lapping around 4th quickest, even through traffic. Unfortunately when he came to challenge for 7th, there were yellow flags preventing him from making a move, meaning he would have to sit behind a far slower car for the last part of the race.
Race two saw the 19 year old make an even better start, getting up to 7th position in just the first half of lap 1! With some slower cars close in front of him, it looked as if Kasper might be in with a chance of grabbing his first podium finish. This excitement was brought to an abrupt end by yet more bad luck, when another competitor ran into the side of his car through the last corner, leaving his car badly damaged and his hopes of a trophy put on hold.
Director of Antel Motorsport Brett Parris commented;
“We were absolutely devastated by that race two result. Knowing that Kasper could have 
made an absolutely storming drive from 13th on the grid to at least fourth position was extremely encouraging, but equally frustrating! In just 3 days of working with us he has shown that he has an enormous amount of raw talent, and is also very intelligent. We will see Kasper bringing trophies home this year, of that I am absolutely certain. He had a lot of bad luck this weekend from start to finish, but if he keeps driving that well then he can only succeed very soon.”
Round 3 of the Championship takes place at Croft on the 3rd and 4th of July.
