A Series of Strange Events – Norway Motorsports Park Club Race #10

It’s now officially September, and by the end of the month the 2025 club racing season at Norway Motorsports Park will be officially over. Three races are left on the calendar, and this is the first of only two that I will be attending to close out the season.

The most recent race we had run on the calendar was the Mid-State Kart Club Ignite Challenge event, and I hadn’t had time to reset the kart for racing at Norway since coming back from Springfield. That meant I woke up to a pretty full plate on Saturday morning. After scrambling for a couple hours to rebuild almost half the kart, I made it out on track late for practice 1, getting only a few laps in. After tying up a couple more loose-ends I thought that’s where the chaos would end, but unfortunately not.

After practice two we had the hour-long lunchbreak, which realistically is almost 2 hours. I decided I wanted to make an axle change before qualifying, and with the long break I would have plenty of time for that. About 45 minutes later and having everything almost put back together, I noticed that the exhaust pipe on my engine was completely loose. What followed was another 30-45 minutes of undoing safety wire, exhaust clamps, heat sleeves, and then redoing all of that again. All those issues combined, I ended up missing qualifying altogether.

Because I missed qualifying, I had to start at the back of the 6-car Ignite Senior field for the heat race… except I didn’t. On the warm-up lap, the pole sitter spun while scrubbing their tires and, in the process, ripped their bumper off. So, with him out of the race and with some confusion from other drivers on where to re-grid, I somehow managed to slot into the third spot, and the race went green like nothing happened.

James Recendez had gotten pole position handed to him through that incident, so he was able to open up a gap pretty early. I tried to catch up, but some early battling with Mike Stephenson slowed us down too much meaning I had to settle for second in the heat. All things considered, good turnaround given I didn’t even qualify for the race.

Now onto the final, and I would once again be sharing the front row with James Recendez. The race gets going, Recendez maintained the lead, and I slot comfortably into second. Now being the attacking driver, I felt the best thing I could do was start pushing him, break away from the field, and make it a two-horse race for the closing laps. That strategy ended up working perfectly, as we had opened up a few seconds on the rest of the field already by the halfway point. Now all I had to do was time my move right and make it stick.

I decided to let it run down all the way to the end, and on the last lap coming out of turn 4, I made the move on the backstretch. We stayed two wide all the way through the Monza, and it was a battle on the brakes heading into turn 8 with me on the inside. I went deep, barely made the corner, and James went back through on the inside. I didn’t have enough time to respond, and crossed the line in second behind Recendez, again.

Looking back, I’m struggling to figure out what I could have done differently to change the outcome of that race. Should I have passed him earlier? Should I have made the move in a different corner? Would all this had even happened if I actually qualified? Not sure I have an answer to any of those yet. As always, big thanks to CKT Racing and Jim Perry for the help he’s given me both on and off track this year; every weekend I’ve been getting better and better because of the work he’s done. Only one more race to go in the 2025 Norway Ignite Season, and one last statement to make!