By Anand Philar, IANS
Chennai : The 11th JK Tyre National Road Racing Championship starts at the MMST Track in Sriperumbudur near here Saturday, with two days of action that will see super bikes, saloon cars, home-bred Frmula machines and an endurance competition.
While the popular saloon car racing stages a comeback after a two-year break, the Endurance event in the Formula Hyundai class, for some reason, has been removed from the main championship programme.
The list of competitors include a majority of those who raced last year, including the talented Chennai teenager Ashwin Sundar who won the championship in Formula Swift and Hyundai classes.
He will be moving to the showcase class of Formula Rolon-Chevrolet that last year witnessed keen competition with Aditya Patel eventually winning the championship. Aditya, also from Chennai, has since moved to Formula BMW Asia series.
The teams include NK Racing, run by Narain Karthikeyan, WSRF with Leela, Gemini Racing, Rams Racing, Prime Racing, Amaron with Meco, ELF with Meco, Red Rooster and Meco Motorsports.
Each round will have two races. For the second race, the grid would be reversed for top eight as in the GP2 series.
The main attraction of course would be the Super Bike races even though it is virtually a one-man event with Dilip Roger on a full-blown racing machine facing no competition worth the name. Last year, he was quicker than more than five seconds, reducing the races to a virtual farce.
It is likely to be the same as only a few of the bikers have machines in racing trim, much less well-versed in race craft.
Originally, this weekend’s event planned to be a non-championship event to be run concurrently with the All-India Motor Races. The Madras Motor Sports Club wanted to revive the AIMR in a bid to replicate the ‘Sholavaram races’ that died a natural death when the races moved to the current track in the early 1990s from the abandoned World War airstrip in suburban Chennai.
However, the AIMR was cancelled due to paucity of funds and the logistics of importing Formula cars that were to be run during the weekend. The organisers then decided to go ahead with the Indian Formula championship.
The JK RRC faced teething problems right through the 2007 season with teams complaining of non-availability of spares, absence of a spec sheet and consequently, scrutineering. Performance of some of the cars aroused suspicion, but nothing could be done since there was no post-event scrutiny.
Over the winter months, representatives of various teams and the sole manufacturer, LGB Group of Coimbatore, had several meetings in a bid to sort out technical issues, especially the preparation of the ‘spec sheet’ and its distribution among the competing teams.
“As of now, we are yet to receive a spec sheet regarding the 2008 cars and hence the first round this weekend, the cars would be to 2007 specifications. We need at least three to four months to prepare cars and hopefully, the spec sheets would be finalised and distributed in the immediate future,” said Parasuram, owner of Ram’s Racing.
The restructuring of the RRC has not been well received in some quarters that feel that the exit of Formula Hyundai from the main championship did not serve any purpose as it reduced the classes to just two, the Formula Swift and Formula Rolon-Chevrolet.
The Hyundai machine was a workhorse that suited the first-timers as it withstood plenty of punishment. Being heavy and ponderous in view of the power-to-weight ratio, helped newcomers to learn the basics of race craft and it was a far safer machine to drive in view of the relatively lesser top speed.
The schedule:
Round 1 – Feb 9-10, Chennai
Round 2 – June 28-29, Coimbatore
Round3 – July 26-27, Coimbatore
Round 4 – Aug 11-12, Coimbatore
Round 5 – Sep 20-21, Chennai
Round 6 – Oct 4-5, Chennai