The 13th Annual KO GP hosted by WLRC will take place over the August Bank Holiday weekend as usual. The dates are Saturday 23rd August to Monday 25th August 2008.
Live results including practice times available at the WLRC Live Timing website. This was new for this year as was the fact that the same information was available trackside for anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled phone, PDA or notebook.
The 2008 event will use round by round qualifying with the best two runs from five qualifying rounds to count. This means a return of the Monday qualifiying run to give driver's who had a bad Sunday something to look forward to. The full timetable looks like this.
The event will be contested by four classes comprising of 27 Turn Stock Touring, 13.5 Brushless, BRCA Pro Stock and Open Modified (5-cell modified or 6.5 brushless with 6-cell or LiPos). LiPo batteries are allowed for all classes except obviously 5-cell modified. A control tyre is again being used. This year it is the pre-mounted Sorex 32R as used at the BRCA nationals with a limit of three sets of tyres per driver. The classes are described in detail within the rules.
The finals entries as booking closed are:
The entries included three regular Norweigan visitors and Yokomo team driver Martin Hofer from Germany.
Pictures from the event will appear in the photo
gallery.
Practice and booking in was held on the Saturday. The track was coked in the morning and offered lots of grip during practice. There was three controlled practice sessions with free practice both before and after the controlled practice.
Overnight rain washed away all the grip and meant almost two complete rounds of wet qualifying. The first round was totally wet with the rain falling. The rain stopped during the second round and the track went through the greasy phase for the top Pro-Stock drivers before drying quickly to give the top heat of open modified a chance to run on an almost dry track. For round three the track had dried rapidly with the sun out but unlike Saturday the grip was very much lower. As more cars ran in the dry the grip continued to improve.
With
round by round qualifying in use the positions after four rounds had some
interesting positions as the wet specialist scored good positions in the
first two rounds. Everyone was kept in touch with the latest positions
through the trackside web server. For those away from the track the
live timing website kept them
informed.
With qualifying after round four looking like this everyone has one final chance in the fifth and final round in the morning. A number of drivers did not run in the rain and may only have one good result so the qualifying order may change considerably tomorrow. Only time will tell.
Monday dawned with overcast conditions but a bone dry track. The fifth
and final round of qualifying gave everyone one last chance to get a good
score for their round by round points. In 27 Turn Stock Clive Bonner did
just that to move from 4th to 2nd with Rishi keeping first and Jordan
Brown dropping down from 2nd to 3rd. In 13.5 Brushless the order remained
unchanged with Dave Ringsell taking pole from Jamie Guy and Paul Sanders.
In Pro Stock it remained Ashley Wiffen from Paul Pinkney and Matt
Pocknell. In Open Modified again the top three remained the same with
Chris Grainger from Ben Cosgrove and Olly Jefferies. The big mover was
James Howarth who won the round and moved from 15th to 4th dropping Glenn
Doman into the B Final.
The first round of finals started at 11am after concourse which was won
by Keith Ross and Lee Campbell.
The finals were run in reverse alphabetic order building up to the A finals for the four classes. Commentary was provided for all the finals by Kris Kennedy. After two rounds of finals only Chris Grainger had secured victory in his class. The overall positions were still to race for in all the other classes.
The
first two sets of finals were run straight through to the published
schedule. Following the second round of finals the mighty KO raffle was
drawn with many great prices along with the KO clock.
The third and final set of finals were run to decide the champions in the remaining three classes. After all finals had been run we had four champions in the form of Rishi, Dave Ringsell, Nathan Parker and Chris Grainger.
Page last updated on 26th August 2008.