Jake Spencer's Japanese Diary - Day One

The Kosmic kart Jake Spencer will compete aboard at the Asia Pacific KF2 Championship in Japan

The Kosmic Racing Department team and I arrived at the track this morning at around 11:00am. Upon arrival, there were around 20 kart sized boxes waiting in our pit area waiting for us to unload. Each box had come from the OTK (Tony Kart/Kosmic) factory in Italy. Inside the boxes were all the team’s karts, tents and spares for the weekend.

Once everything had been unloaded the mechanics started building the karts. In the Kosmic team there are six drivers – two are racing KF1 (Daiki Sasaki and Tereza Gromanova) and four are racing in KF2 (Paulo Ippolito, Nicklas Nielson, Tanaporn Nokkaew and myself). Each driver has two brand new karts and a mechanic assigned to them for the weekend. My mechanic is called Alessandro and he is Italian. He speaks very little English, however it is enough for us to communicate basic things. He has taught me how to say ‘understeer’ and ‘oversteer’ in Italian which should make things easier for the weekend!

The two karts come from the factory as almost bare chassis’. This meant that we had a long day ahead of us building the two karts completely. Alessandro (my mechanic) was surprised that I was able to help build the karts with him, as most the other team drivers went off and did their own thing while the mechanics built their karts. The Kosmic team back in Italy make it as easy as possible for the mechanics through pre drilling seats for each driver as well as doing the front end wheel alignments on all karts before they arrive in Japan.

Once all the karts were built I did a track walk with the other drivers in the team. One of the KF1 drivers in the team (Daiki Sasaki) is from Japan and has a lot of knowledge on the Suzuka track. He was happy to answer any questions from the other drivers which was a great benefit to myself in particular as I have never driven on the circuit. The Suzuka circuit is 1,264 metres in length and seems to be very fast and flowing compared to the tracks we have in Australia.

Tomorrow we have our first day of testing. I have four x 15 minute sessions to learn the track and work on the kart set up.

I will keep you updated throughout the weekend,

Jake

Find all the information on the World KF1 Championship and Asia-Pacific KF2 Championship on www.cikfia.com or via the link http://www.cikfia.com/competitions/cik-calendar/2012/suzuka/event-guide.html