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| January 22, 2006 News |
| EKN Trackside: Florida Winter Tour #1 - Homestead - Saturday Report |
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 | DL Racing's Keith Spicer scored the win in Pro Shifter
(Photo: Todd McCall - OTP) |
If there is a success story in North American karting right now, it’s Bill Wright’s Florida Winter Tour. Launched in 1999 as one of the initial SKUSA satellite regional series, the Tour was taken over by Wright in 2000 when he became the official Regional Director. Growing roots in the state by focusing on the cooler winter months with a tight three-weekend program, the FWT has become the unofficial East Coast ‘spring training’ program for the national level of the sport. This weekend in Homestead, the Florida regulars are facing off against some of the best national pilots in the country. As a program, this one is one of the absolute best available.
The series runs two full days of racing on Saturday and Sunday, and the first day’s events were extremely exciting. The Pro Shifter class is stacked and on Saturday, DL Racing’s Keith Spicer (Tony Kart) turned it on in the main event to outrun Daniel Morad (First Kart) for the win. The Canadian had set the early pace by winning the pole and the Prefinal, but he just didn’t have it in the Final. Behind the front-running duo, Jon Branam (Birel) ran a solo third and he will look to improve his pace for today’s races.
 | Brit Alexander Sims is the class of the ICA field
(Photo: Todd McCall - OTP) |
The ICA class was added to the FWT menu this year to further develop the series’ position as the primer for the Stars of Karting national circuit and an impressive 20 ICA are on the grid. Briton Alexander Sims (CRG) is in town running with PSL Karting and he was the class of the field on Saturday, pulling away from the competition to win handily. Chris Larson (Margay) moved forward and assumed second, closing the gap on Sims in the latter stages, but he could not mount a challenge.
Once again, the ICA class suffered huge attrition both through mechanical failures and poor driving decisions, leading Race Director Chris Egger to make direct comments to the class in this morning’s drivers meeting. Egger told the ICA pilot that instead of driving like ‘talented pros’ they behaved like ‘club wankers’. The message was most definitely delivered and we’ll see how things shake down today.
In JICA, another new addition to the dance card, First Kart’s new pilot Brett Smrz took the victory over J3’s Victor Cabrera and Richard Benitez, both on Kosmic chassis. Watch for all three of these drivers to battle for race wins on the Stars of Karting program this year.
 | Canadian Eric Gerrits powered his First Kart to the Rotax Senior win
(Photo: Todd McCall - OTP) |
Canadian Rotax Champ Eric Gerrits (First Kart) was the man in Rotax Senior, cashing in on a large midway point cushion to win the race when it was called following a red flag incident. The huge fields had pushed the schedule at least an hour off its published time and the Race Director elected to call the event complete as it had passed the halfway mark. In Stock Moto, which boasted a lightly-improved eight entries, Shockwave’s Greg Welch won over P.J. Chesson and Michael Winchester.
Matthew Mair scored a solid Rotax Junior victory over national hotshoe Hayden Duerson while Doug Cox (Masters), James Ferguson (Expert Shifter), Nadir Magsi (Expert Shifter Heavy), John Brown Sr. (TaG Heavy) and Daniel Formal (MiniMax) all scored class wins as well.
We’ll have constant updates throughout the day in the official EKN forum thread.
Full Results - EKN Trackside Event Page
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