Gunning for Glory
The young Novice Class riders head back to Chennai for another weekend of racing
The ThIRd Round oF The TVS one Make Championship (novice Class) was held at Chennai’s MMRT circuit alongside the third round of the MRF FMSCI Indian national Motorcycle Racing Championship over the first weekend of August. A dozen young racers took part, fighting for the championship and a place to race with the big boys in the nationals next year, riding race-prepped TVS Apache RTR 200 4V motorcycles around the 3.7-kilometre-long circuit. here is what went down.
Race One
Saturday’s race saw hyderabad’s Karthik Mateti dominate for the entire six laps, setting the best lap of the race (2:15.531) and crossing the finish-line with a five-second lead. Chennai duo Anand R and Suhail Ahamed spent the duration of the race jousting for position and fighting for second place. In the end, it was Anand who secured the second spot, barely a 10th of a second ahead of Suhail, with the rest of the field over 10 seconds behind.
Race Two
Sunday was once again Karthik’s day, but this time he had to fight for the victory with Anand, who just didn’t let him pull away. Karthik dug deep to better his best lap from the previous day with a time of 2:14.877 and crossed the line less than two-tenths of a second ahead of Anand. The lead pair were in a class of their own, for it took another nine seconds for third-place finisher Venkatesan to cross the finish-line.