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With Seth confirmed as the 2005 F6 Junior Royale Champion, and IMSD Racing as 2005 Club100 Inters Champions, Speedyseth.co.uk’s Web Editor caught up with IMSD team boss Stephen Deuchar to look back on the dramatic 2005 season.
WE: It’s been an extraordinary year for IMSD Racing. Did it exceed your expectations?
SD: Yes, our endurance racing team (the drivers are me, Ian Miller, Eddie Hall and Ian Wilson) clinched the 2005 100cc Inters title at Whilton Mill the day after Seth was confirmed as F6 Junior Royale champion at Lydd. That was a pretty good weekend. And of course we started out the season not really expecting to win so consistently on either front. Now, with one race still to go (Buckmore Park, 6 November), the endurance team has taken 5 wins and 4 other podiums from 11 starts, and Seth took 3 wins, four seconds and 5 poles on his way to the F6 title. That all adds up to quite a few trophies cluttering up the house.
WE: Any particular highlights of the year?
SD: Spoiled for choice really, but the IMSD win in the 10-hour race at Spa Francorchamps was a great experience for us all, and Seth’s first Junior Royale race win at Buckmore was very special: it was only his third class race start and the tenth race he’d ever competed in.
WE: What’s Seth’s role in the endurance team?
SD: He’s in charge of timekeeping and pit-signalling, and he takes part in planning and executing the strategy. He works just as hard for us as I do for him in his F6 races. He really gets into it: he said at Whilton that he felt so nervous he was nearly physically sick when watching my lead coming down lap by lap to less than half a second at the flag. Once he’s 16 we’ll draft him into the main race team and I will retire gracefully.
WE: How does F6 compare with Club100?
SD: Well, they’re both very well organised and supported, and run by dedicated people. Club100 is much tighter on discipline on and off-track, and the atmosphere is always good. The fields are big too. F6 is great, and it’s been a wonderful environment for Seth to start racing, but its overall numbers are beginning to drop slightly and I think it needs a new push to attract support. Four-stroke racing doesn’t have as sexy an image as 2-stroke racing, and F6 needs to work on that. It needs a proper website, for a start! And the standards of preparation of some of the karts have been below par in my view. All the basic ingredients are there - it just needs some polish and some good PR.
WE: What about the Junior Royale class in particular?
SD: I think it’s an amazing class. It’s as fast as TKM 2-stroke and as cheap and reliable as Cadets, and the racing is closer. But the image problem is once again the issue: some of the karts simply don’t look as good as they should do, and that makes a difference with fashion-conscious, brand-led kids who are more easily drawn by TKM or Rotax. But it wouldn’t be too difficult to fix. I think Royale competitors should all be told to run with new-style (08) bodywork, and we should agree a standard and good-looking design for an engine cover. Those two simple steps would go a long way, but the good news is that there is a lot of interest for next year, so maybe we’ve turned the corner already.
WE: Tell us about Seth’s year.
SD: I think he’s been the class of the field from the word go and no-one was more surprised than us by that. He was immediately confident, and he has a very neat, tidy and flowing driving style that makes him very quick without often appearing to be. By contrast, some of the older drivers tended to throw their karts all over the track with armfuls of opposite lock, and weren’t that fast. Generally the younger and less experienced drivers were more impressive by the end of the year – people like Dylan or Michael Gibbons, who’ve just been getting better and better. Some of the older drivers were shown up, got a bit frustrated, got even wilder - and therefore slower. Seth kept his cool, won races, stayed out of trouble, and in the end finished 48 points ahead of his nearest overall rival, Ryan, and 110 points on top of his closest class rival, Michael. To be honest it was a bit of a walkover.
WE: What about the performance comparison between the Light and Intermediate classes?
SD: Trevor Taylor found in testing that the performance advantage of the modified carb was about a second a lap. Meanwhile Intermediates had to run 17kg heavier, which would normally cost you about a second a lap. So the end result was the same for both classes. In practice, on fast circuits the Intermediates probably still had a slight performance advantage, but on the slow circuits it evened out. What made much more difference was driving styles, the younger and lighter drivers were generally much more smooth and precise. Of the Intermediate drivers Carla Wellings and Sam Holt were the neatest and quickest with the most long-term potential as racing drivers, in my view.
WE: Were you impressed by the drivers?
SD: Yes I was, and that’s why Seth’s success was all the sweeter. He was up against some hard, experienced drivers and yet with only a handful of races behind him he showed them the way. His rivals tended to be more accomplished and uncompromising overtakers, and Seth was in my view a bit too tentative in that department sometimes. He did pull off some great overtaking moves during the season, though, and he only made one stupid lunge (on Carla at Bayford) all season. He was rightly ticked off once or twice for contact during close racing. One or two of his rivals I thought were a bit of a liability, though. The level of aggression and at the second Buckmore race was plain silly. But of course by that stage Seth was running away with the championship, his rivals and their dads were sore, and a lot of the sportsmanship just seemed to evaporate for the day.
WE: Karting dads have a terrible reputation. Were you as bad as the rest of them?
SD: Yes, probably, though I tried always to be civil - even when the dad of Seth’s closest rival threatened me with ‘death’ on the basis that he thought Seth had made a joke at his son’s expense!! You have to laugh at how seriously we take it all. But most of the dads have been pretty good. For example, even though Seth and Jamie Haines never got on with each other on track, Jamie’s dad remains one of the most cheerful and generous people in the paddock. Next year the couple of grumpy dads are moving classes, and the new ones, some of whom I met at the recent Royale test day at Bayford, seem a great deal more civilised!
WE: What are your predictions for next year?
SD: I’m not going to tempt fate by predicting that Seth will retain his title, in fact the signs are that the competition will be a lot tougher next year. The new lads coming in looked much quicker and smoother than the old crowd. I just hope Seth enjoys himself, enjoys carrying the no.1 plate, learns more race-craft, and I hope to pick up some more experience about kart set-up. My glory days of karting back in the 1970s are a long time ago and I do make mistakes. Of his four poor results this year, three (Bayford, Whilton, Lydd) were caused by problems that were ultimately my fault – a wrongly adjusted chain, wrong tyre choice, oil on the clutch.
WE: Thank you and good luck to the IMSD Senior and Junior teams next year. |
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