IKWC Nations Cup Race - report by driver Gregory Laporte (Team Hong Kong)

The race began with 2 starts.

Start 1 : Worldkarts marshalls were going to demonstrate "LeMans Start", but when the light turned green some of the guys went for it, causing all other drivers to jump into their kart and leave...

Everyone stopped, although not everyone was able to stop in time. Timo (Laporte) of Belgium 2 had to avoid a bunch of drivers, resulting in him hitting Mathias Grooten's kart in the back quite hard. No bad intentions of course, and he went straight to Mathias afterwards to apologize. Just wanted to point that out.

Start 2 (good one) : Green lights & GO, I started from p3 (for team Hong Kong), and was P1 after the 1st corner. I love the Le Mans start!! Behind me there was some pushing and shoving of course, which resulted in the Austrians losing almost a lap, because a Brazilian team's kart was on top of his I think. Also Mathias Grooten from Belgium got spun round in lap 1, but no action was taken by the marshalls.. I/we still don't know who did that to him, and this is too bad it happened, because they had a great race and without that incident they probably could've won the race. But better now than next week, I guess..

In the first lap I had to give away my lead to the light Brazilian driver, who was top class in the early stages. He was light of course, but his pace was amazing. Also from Belgian driver Mats De Jong, who drove a great race, and although he had a bad start (lost couple of spots) he regained P2 in lap 3 or 4 I think. I didn't want to put up much of a fight, because the race was just underway and I wanted to gain as much as possible on P4 and below... Which I succeeded in, and when I came into the pits after 45mins, we were P3, well ahead of P4, and a couple of sec's away of getting lapped..

Kenny took over and continued with my kart, and he did a great job. Our young racer did fantastic, and posted our team's fastest lap, a 40.7. Kenny closed the gap to team Belgium, who was leading the race all of a sudden after the Brazilians switched karts. Stefan Jacobs drove a great race (his best at Kortrijk to date?), and despite the fact that he's heavier than Mats he stayed within 0.4 sec of his best lap.

Geoffrey Mertens, our third driver took over and got Kenny's second kart, and drove superbly as well. He was our heaviest driver,(plus the lead we were carrying), and his average times were very very good. We sent him out to maintain what we achieved, and he did even better by passing Jan Vergote of Belgium for P2. Unfortunately we lost some time when we did our final driver change (lap after kart change n°2), because Geoff passed trough the kart change area first before going for the driver change. No harm done though, we fell back to P3 behind Belgium Waaihof, but now our driver Steven To had 40+ minutes to close a 10sec gap to Robin Borremans ahead.

Steven, a lot lighter, and motivated like hell because his Nation had a shot at the win, drove like a mad man and posted very good times. His new kart didn't allow him to go below the 41.0's to much, but still he did what he could do and had respectable averages. He passed Robin Borremans for (virtual) P2 again with and then he continued to chase Poul Horneman, Brazil's heaviest driver. The Brazilians were 1.5 lap ahead, but Hong Kong and Belgium W managed to unlap themselves with 20 something minutes remaining.

In the final 6 or 7 minutes Steven did what we never would've dreamed, and that was pass Poul for the lead in the closing stages. Great stuff of course, and cool that the Belgians managed to do the same thing in the penultimate lap. Like I said before, they drove a great race as well and they deserve a lot of credit.

The reigning champions got beaten by Hong Kong, but the best thing for me was that Mathias Grooten & all the other guys from Team Talent Promotion Belgium came to us and said "well done guys", we had the win on merit, and they were happy for us. This felt really good, so thanks to them for their sportsmanship. Same goes for the Brazilians and especially 2007 IKWC World Champion Rodrigo Faulhaber, who is an awesome guy, and was one of the first to come 'n say "Well done guys".

Getting these words from the world's best drivers feels great, and it makes us laugh a little bit about the criticism that comes from within Belgium itself.. Past few weeks we haven't been on the forums to much because we didn't feel to much support from the other parts in Belgium, but at the end of the day we're getting the respect we deserve from the people who matter, our competitors, and that's what counts most.

So HONG KONG (China) is the new Country World Champion, which is wonderful for our driver Steven To. His mom lives back in Hong Kong, and you can imagine her joy when he phoned her with the great news. On a side note, Geoffrey Mertens lost his grandfather (who was a 2nd father to him as well) only a week & half ago, and of course, this win was quite an emotional one for him as well (he had a picture of his grandfather in his pocket whilst racing). This win is a dedication to Steven's family in Hong Kong, and to Geoffrey's grandfather, who would've been so proud of his grandson.

I love the fact that I (& Kenny Geldhof) helped these guys to this win, seriously, and I even had tears to my eyes when I was telling it to my brother on the phone (who had to work in the afternoon). Crybaby's!!