Pietermaritzburg, iDube Raceway – 03/04 July 2009 – The ENGEN Supa Karts Vortex Super ROK National Series was held at the roller coaster, thrill packed iDube Raceway where a field of 16 competitors demonstrated the top talent in South Africa.
Practice started off on a good note for Fabienne and the race weekend looked very promising, a good pace placed her among the top 3 in the practice time sheets. The team suffered slightly with excessive grip giving an unpredictable session and Fabienne struggled to keep up the pace.
Prior to qualifying, Fabienne consulted her team to make crucial adjustments to the kart set up, allowing her more movement and less grip, this proved a positive call and allowed he to qualify 4th on the grid.
During Heat one, the changes proved positive but were short-lived. Fabienne, by the end of the fifteen lap race finished in 6 position. With heat two and much more to prove, Fabienne again made adjustments to the kart, and quickly took second place which lasted for six laps, a fantastic one on one challenge with Leeroy Poulter and Simon Moss allowed Fabienne to demonstrate her talent once again. Nearing the last laps the lacking performance of the kart could only award Fabienne a fifth position.
As the sun started to set around 4pm, the track started to cool, Fabienne and her team hoped that the cooler condition in heat three would offer better performance from the kart and give optimum grip.
The kart did perform better, but not enough and due to an unfortunate false start mix up she experienced a karters nightmare. Drivers in front of Fabienne thought it was a false start, and so backed off, she had to apply so much breaking to avoid hitting them her engine cut out, experience stepped in and she managed to get it started again to now take her position in fourth place. The melee had allowed many other drivers to pass Fabienne as she was stuck behind the confused drivers. This allowed many other drivers behind her to overtake and thus she spent the majority of the race re-gaining her position up in fourth, by this time the gap was far too large from the front pack to catch them during the short heat, Fabienne finished fifth for the heat and fifth overall for the day.
Fabienne is now 4th overall in the championship and goes into the final round with some confidence as the race will be held at Vereeniging, her home track on 09 August 2009.
“I would like to thank my team for all their hard efforts, even if the result was not quite what we wanted, my team still did an outstanding job as the kart’s reliability is outstanding.”, she said.