David Sera’s return to the Karting Australia Championships didn’t go as smoothly as he’d liked competing at the Corio Raceway, Geelong VIC on the 1st November 2015. Being only his second start for the 2015 season, Sera showed glimpses of speed throughout Friday practice topping the opening session and finishing the day the third fastest. “Having not tested or driven at Geelong in a KZ kart for over a year we were quite surprised to be sitting at the top of the time sheets in the first practice. After making some changes and putting new tyres on, we were happy to be third at the end of the day and confident we can get close to making tomorrow’s shootout.”
Cold and wet weather conditions greeted drivers for Saturday mornings ten-minute qualifying. Sera took his Deadly Kart to the front of the pack to get some clear laps and was setting times within the top five positions before contact by another kart forced Sera to watch the remaining few minutes from the sidelines as the conditions became drier and faster. This ultimately placed Sera in fifteenth position to start the three heat races. “Fifteenth isn’t a true indication of how fast our kart was. It’s a shame we got involved in an incident, but in difficult conditions these things happen.”
With Geelong being a circuit notorious for tight racing around the 760m circuit, passing was hard to come by and Sera was able to take advantage of some other drivers misfortunes to take home eighth place after the twenty lap opening heat race. Heat two saw a few bad kart setup adjustments prevent Sera from moving forward to take out fifteenth then the final heat race on Sunday morning the DPE Kart Technology driver worked his way forward to ninth place.
After calculating the three heat races to determine the 33 lap final grid positions, Sera would start his Deadly / JT Engines package in tenth place. Making a good jump off the start line and missing a first corner incident Sera was into eighth on the opening lap. With all drivers utilising a brand new set of MG tyres passing was hard to come by. Sera made his way past the Birel of Josh Smith before picking off Troy Loeskow into sixth spot and that’s where he found himself at the end of the race. “Sixth is a decent result after qualifying down the order. We were still a couple of tenths off the fastest karts so no doubt there’s more work to do over the off season”.
The next and final race of the year for Sera will be at the SuperNats in Las Vegas, Nevada where he will compete in Tag Senior for the KartSport North America team. Sera has placed on the podium three out of the last four years.