RCD/FPW Racing 125GP team - Knockhill race report

The 5th round of the Sunoco British Championship was held north of the Border at Scotlands
premier circuit, Knockhill, in Fife. Although one of the shorter circuits on the calendar at 1.27
miles, the changes in elevation favour the brave and committed. The circuit does however
have a dedicated fast line and it’s often the case that in order to make the pass you’ll need to
go off the clean line.

Both Tom Carne and Callan Cooper started the very wet weekend in promising moods. In Fridays
free practice (FP) 1 held in pouring rain, Tom was sitting at the top of the leader board
with the fastest lap of the session for quite some time before being pushed back to 2nd fastest
in the dying seconds of the session. Unfortunately for Tom his last lap of the session was
cut short when he and two others ended up in the muddy run of area as he crashed going into
the Seat Curves. Cal was 1.2 sec behind his Lancashire teammate in 12th.

The 2nd FP session of the day (again with monsoon) saw Cal push himself up to the front of
the table and hold a top four position on the timing screen. Having had such a difficult rookie
season, it was good to see Cals natural talent shine through as he ended the 20 minute session
in 3rd place. Less than a second behind in 7th, Tom was again happy with his performance.
The sector times and data from the bike did show that Tom was struggling with confidence
going through the Seat Curves (the place of his earlier accident). He knew himself he
wasn’t attacking like he had in the earlier session.

Comfortingly there was no change in conditions for Saturdays Qualifying (Q) 1 and Cal took off
to get himself up the qualifying timing board as quickly as he could. Cal ran with the quicker
riders throughout and led the session for the final third of the 25 minutes. That was until he
was piped to the provisional pole by Joe Irving. Tom’s Q-1 performance looked to going all
wrong as the 17yr old languished down towards the tail end of the timing screens for much of the session.
With only a couple of minutes left Tom seemed to pick himself up and pushed harder to end the timed session in 13th.