Top Auckland karter Daniel Kinsman had his toughest trans-Tasman weekend yet but fought back to finish seventh in class at the latest round of Australia’s Rotax Max Challenge Pro Tour at Warwick in Queensland on Sunday.
The 20-year-old was one of three young Kiwis competing at the meeting with Wellington sisters Madeline and Ashleigh Stewart finishing sixth and eighth respectively in the Junior Max Trophy class.
The weekend started well for former New Zealand 125cc Rotax Max Light champion and representative Kinsman, with third place in qualifying on Saturday. But things quickly took a turn for the worst in the first heat race of the weekend when he was hit from behind and sent spinning into the trackside barrier while in second place.
The crash badly bent the frame of Kinsman’s Praga kart but frantic work in the pits saw it back together in time for the second heat, in which the young Kiwi finished a lucky third after an incident behind him delayed some of the other top runners.
That was as good as it was going to get on Saturday however, because in the third heat Kinsman finished back in eighth place after light drizzle made fighting an ill-handling kart even harder.
The team Daniel runs with had a spare frame he could buy, however, so the meeting officials were approached and asked if the team could swap the engine and running gear from the bent kart to a new one.
The answer was yes, but rather than being the end of the problem it was only the beginning.
The next morning as they were preparing for the Pre-Final and Final Kinsman was asked if he realised that because he was effectively using a new kart (not the one he had started the weekend with) he would have to start Sunday’s races from the rear of the field!
Having already gone through hell to stay in the game and earn a hard-won P9 starting place for the Pre-Final the 20-year-old was understandably reluctant to give that up on a technicality.
The result was that he and his family came up with Plan B – accept the offer from the CRG Australia team to straighten the bent frame on their mobile jig, then take all the good bits back off the new frame and bolt them back onto the one they started the weekend on.
“It really was good of the CRG guys to offer, ” Kinsman’s mother Anita said yesterday.”Lane Moore (a Kiwi now living and racing in Australia) went over with Dan to ask and they just said, sure, we can’t have a Kiwi coming all the way over from New Zealand and not race. We received an enormous amount of help and it was really good sportsmanship on behalf of a team we were competing against.”
The fact that the team had a mobile frame straightening jig in their truck says a lot about both the standard and professionalism of the sport across the Tasman, and with just a few minutes to spare Kinsman was heading to the grid to take up his spot on the fifth row of the grid for the Light class Pre-Final.
Fate, wasn’t quite finished, however, because two laps into the race a crash in front of him left Kinsman nowhere to go….and when the dust cleared he found himself at the back of the field and only able to make it back up to 19th place by the time the flag came out.
Undeterred, but wondering when this particular streak of bad luck would break, Kinsman then had what in comparison to the rest of his weekend, was a dream run in the Final, setting the fastest race lap on his way from 19th to 7th.
The Stewart sisters also had reason to be pleased with how they went at Warwick. Madeline got up to fourth place in the Junior Max Trophy class before slipping back to sixth at the flag. Ashleigh, meanwhile, spent much of the Final dicing for seventh place though ending up eighth,
Kinsman and the Stewart sisters now have a month at home until the final round of the 2013/14 Australian series at Coffs Harbour on the Central New South Wales Coast over the July 19-20 weekend.
They will also be part of a larger group which will cross the Tasman for the annual Rotax Nationals event at Ipswich in Queensland in September.
