Hawksworth in wheeltracks of a racing legend

Jack Hawksworth’s run of ill-fortune since making the step up to KF1 showed few signs of leaving him alone in his most recent outing at Shenington, as the young Bradford ace once again found himself on the pace but out of luck.

The former BRDC Stars of Tomorrow Super ICC front-runner has suffered with a variety of issues since stepping up a gear into the UK’s premier karting class last month, but trading lap times with pace-setters Mark Litchfield and Jordon Lennox-Lamb throughout practice gave him considerable cause for optimism at the fast Oxfordshire circuit.

“Practice was up-and-down,” Jack recounted. “The conditions weren’t very good, and you can’t really get much productive done when it’s like that. The track was greasy and we had a few problems in the first couple of sessions, but at the end of the day we were still as quick as anyone else out there once we had put our race motor on.

“On the Sunday I was hoping I would be pretty competitive and finally have a trouble-free race in KF1. At the start of the day it was absolutely soaking; by the time the first heat came round it was beginning to dry out, but we were still all on wets.”

An impressive showing saw the 16-year-old come through the order from eighth on the grid into fourth at the chequered flag in heat one – displaying his potential by lapping consistently as the second-quickest man on the track – but those ever-present gremlins would return to haunt him in heat two, leaving him down in eighth position and sixth on the starting grid for the all-important final.

“I was still feeling confident because we had made a lot of changes to the chassis,” he asserted. “We had tested there prior to the weekend in the dry and been very quick; we knew our set-up was strong. I didn’t feel I would be able to win the race, because Litchfield on pole was so quick, but I thought we could slot into the gap between him and the chasing pack.”

That, though, was where the earlier optimism ended, as Jack immediately recognised all was not well with his kart before the action had even got underway. Helpless as his rivals breezed past him one-by-one, he fell down to second-to-last place, before a change to his main jet to make it leaner produced an upturn in performance and allowed him to fight his way back through to sixth spot at the close – though still far from what he had been hoping for.

“On the warm-up lap the kart wasn’t pulling very well,” he said, taking up the story. “I thought I would give it a couple of laps, but the first four or five laps were absolutely dreadful and I was a second-and-a-half slower than the leaders. There was a time I actually wondered if there was any point in continuing – I was miles off the pace.

“We didn’t know how the jet had got like that – we hadn’t changed anything, but we had left the kart on its own for a couple of minutes whilst I was on the grid. That was our mistake, and I’m still fairly inexperienced with the carburettor in KF1 so I didn’t know I should have leaned the main jet off from the start.

“When I came in I was pretty angry; sixth place and battling with the mid-pack runners is not where I want to be. It was really frustrating, because I’ve got some good equipment – the chassis is good and the engine is good and we know we should be pushing the leader and trying to win races.”

There was, at least, some better news as Jack was selected as Newcomer of the Year in the British ICC Championship – “That was good because you know you’ve got on it quicker than all the other drivers who came into the category back at the beginning of the year” – as a result of a superb season that saw him clinch the runner-up spot in the hotly-fought class at his maiden attempt and with only the resources of his small, family-run team at his disposal. What’s more, he is now preparing to make his bow in the gearbox-based German Winter Cup at Kerpen – the same circuit where a certain Michael Schumacher first cut his competitive karting teeth.

“I’ve agreed to race with PDB in KZ2 in Europe next year,” he explained, “so we are just going out there to test some engines. There will be some top gearbox drivers there, and it should be a good challenge.”

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