With Covid restrictions slowly being relaxed, karting circuits have been able to open their doors with social distancing measures in place to get the racing season underway.

This weekend saw Malmesbury’s Louis Harvey make a return to the racetrack and he put in a strong debut racing for the Argenti Motorsport team in the Senior Rotax class at Whilton Mill Kart circuit.

The weekend before he was also able to visit Shenington Kart track to collect his 2nd place trophy from last year’s club championship and was also awarded the very prestigious Shenington Kart Club “Driver of the Year” for 2020.

His name will now be added as the 60th recipient of the trophy which in 1975 was awarded to F1 Champion Nigel Mansell.

With a few testing sessions under his belt Louis hit the track for the first race since securing his Junior TKM British Championship title back in October 2020.

Having reached the age of 16 he was required to move up to senior racing and at the same time has change teams and moved from the TKM class to the Rotax Max class.

This change has meant a different chassis and engine to get to grips with and a much older group of drivers.

With a full grid of 34 drivers Harvey started 9th for heat one and by lap four had climbed to 3rd, a position he held until the finish line

Heat two with a grid position of 24th, Harvey knew he had a lot to do in order to work his way through the pack of unfamiliar drivers.

With steady progress he made his way up to 13th before a misjudged manoeuvre caused him to drop back to 17th from which he was only able to recover one place back to 16th before crossing the line.

But when penalties were applied after the race Harvey was promoted to 11th due to a large number of nose cone penalties for the drivers who finished ahead of him.

Heat three and starting down in 19th, Harvey again had a challenging race ahead of him trying to progress through the field whilst keeping his nose clean and out of trouble.

This he managed crossing the line 10th, but again he was promoted to 9th due to another nose cone penalty in front of him.

Points added up, Harvey was starting 3rd in his first ever senior Rotax final and was hoping for a good result.

A nice clean start and Harvey was straight into second place and hoping to pull away.

However, he had strong competition chasing him down and over the course of the race dropped to 4th place but not without a good battle.

Harvey finished just off the podium in 4th place and although happy with his performance, knows he needed to find that last tenth of a second in the new class to be back on the top step.

He will be out racing again in senior Rotax at Clay Pigeon Raceway for the Wessex Challenge, a double header race weekend in two weeks’ time.