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JORDAN KING’S PERFECT PORTUGUESE PODIUM
HARBURY race ace Jordan King amply underlined his credentials as one of the brightest lights on the international karting stage with a front-running performance and podium finish to successfully launch his bid for glory in the all-new WSK World Series at Portimão in Portugal’s Algarve, writes Russell Atkins.
With 37 KF2 class drivers in attendance of the very highest calibre around, the curtain-raising meeting would swiftly helped to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sixteen-year-old King took fourth position in his group in qualifying and seventh overall, which the Harbury ace converted into a brace of fifth places and a comfortable runner-up spot in his three heats, improving in terms of pace on every occasion. In heat two, Jordan featured in the lead scrap all the way through and proved to be consistently one of the quickest driver on the circuit, while in two of the three races he set a better fastest lap time than the winner to earn himself fifth on the grid for the pre-final.
Having dropped as low as eighth as he found himself unwittingly caught up in a fraught six-way dogfight, Jordan was nonetheless again able to demonstrate his raw speed, mature racecraft and undoubted potential—and he would do so once more in the all-important grand final later in the day. Only this time, he would be fittingly rewarded.
“I got up to third at the start and was just about hanging on to the top two,” related the Repton School pupil. “Ignazio D’Agosto made a move on Luke Varley for the lead and I followed him through into second. I then tried to go for the lead myself, but D’Agosto saw it coming and turned in. That lost us both a lot of time and I dropped back to fifth.
“I started to catch the two leaders towards the end but ran out of laps. If my move on D’Agosto had come off, I could possibly have won, but we were still right in there so that was encouraging—and I got to take a trophy home.”
Indeed, there was barely six hundredths of a second to choose between the lead trio at the chequered flag in terms of lap time as Jordan wound up less than seven tenths shy of victory to conclude proceedings fourth in the standings with a third of the WSK World Series campaign now completed. What’s more, the result marked a hat-trick of rostrum finishes in swift succession for the new Hugo Boss ambassador following back-to-back podiums in the national Super 1 Series—and next time, he hopes, it will be the top step that he mounts.
Posted at 10am on 29th July
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