During the weekend of 18-19th July the French circuit of Levier hosted round 2 of the Schaffenhausen karting championship. The track is 1172m long and has a lot of fast and tricky corners. During the free practice sessions Marti had to adapt to the track which he doesn’t know well, it’s the home track for many of his Junior competitors. As a whole, it’s a track that suits his style, but it is also a very demanding fast track and it’s easy to make a mistake. This time out Marti and his fellow Junior class competitors had no chance to trouble the top Senior class drivers because the importance of engine power was too big on the long straights.
In qualifying Marti recorded the 5th best time which was 0.5 sec off the class pole-position. It was unexpected for him and it wasn’t pleasant experience for him. The track at Levier is quite hard with a configuration similar to the tracks used in the WSK. This was to be his first race at the track and considering that he’s anyway too young for his class and his competitors know the track well, it’s quite normal that he wasn’t P1.
In the first manche Marti drove very well and offered strong defense against the slower Senior drivers. He managed to finish 4th in class, but during the race he managed to improve his best time from qualifying by 2 tenths!
Marti had big hopes for the 2nd manche, but his motor seized and he registered a DNF. Because of this retirement he had to start from the last 24th place on the final. Marti showed that he has learned his lesson from the previous races where there were so many first corner crashes on the start. This time he managed to avoid a big crash at the start and he was 12th at the end of the 1st lap! After that he had a stable races, with a lot of hard and aggressive defending to finish 3rd in the final. At the end in the overall classification he took 4th position.
This was a very important weekend which demonstrated Marti’s progress in race craft, he showed a lot of maturity in the battles, but it also showed the difference in experience between Marti at 11 y.o. and his much older competitors.
The next race of the Schaffenhausen championship is at Autoreille, another new, long and technical track in France. At this new track Marti is very determined to close the gap between himself and his fastest competitors in qualifying.
