Last Updated on 24 March, 2024 by gokartprix
Despite the fact that Challenge CUP took place after already 2 stages this year, it still holds the official title of the season’s closing, that’s why it has the year 2022 in its name. This time the event moved to Nyköping indoor track which makes it the 5th venue for our annual time attack challenge. 7 drivers decided to participate, where 2 of them were the GoKart PRIX rookies and 3 previously already won the Challenge CUP trophy.
After the first heat Championship rookie Daniel showed the best lap time followed by Mattias and Berke. 2 Challenge CUP owners Igor and Anatoly were the last ones. Heat 2 proved that Daniel was very fast as he hit another best lap time. Mattias this time was one of the slowest so he let Berke and Nicolas through in the standings.
Heat 3 was the one where all the fun began. For the first time in Challenge CUP history the running direction was changed within the same event! Drivers went the other direction. This time the fastest was another Championship rookie Nicolas. Mattias remembers this configuration from the last Nyköping GoKart PRIX and showed the next best lap time. Berke was 3rd but for Daniel it was an unpleasant surprise since he never drove this direction before. He couldn’t get used to it within the 5 minutes and let Berke on top of the leaderboard. Heat 4 continued in the same opposite direction. This time Igor and Anatoly woke up and showed 1st and 3rd fastest times with Berke inbetween. This way Igor moved to P5 replacing Christer but Berke extended his lead from Daniel.
In the final two heats the second best lap time was taken into account. In Heat 5 racing direction was regular. The fastest were Berke, Mattias and Christer. But 2nd fastest showed Mattias, Berke and Daniel. This let Berke move away from Daniel for 0,65 seconds. And considering the fact that the last heat was supposed to be in the opposite direction this gave a huge hope for Berke since Daniel was struggling in this configuration. Places 3, 4 and 5 were at around 0,3 seconds away from the frontrunning. So Heat 6 could change a lot!
And it did! Igor showed the best lap time of the day in that configuration. Also his 2nd fastest still was the best among the others. Right behind him was Nicolas. Both of them jumped 2 positions upward in the leaderboard clinching 2nd and 3rd place. Anatoly showed a good time but still couldn’t reach Christer in standings. Mattias finished P4 in total. Berke was experiencing weird moments during the last heat when his gokart had only 2 wheels on the ground during the hard left turn. He was losing some time in that corner. On the last lap when most of the drivers were on their quickest lap Berke couldn’t make the final corner and hit the wall. Daniel at that time already showed his best which was a 0,8 seconds… slower then Berke’s! It meant that Berke became the 7th owner of the GoKart PRIX Challenge CUP! And he didn’t even win a single heat, which has never happened before! In fact, last year (as well as in 2019) the winner was the fastest in every heat.
This is a huge milestone for Berke and we congratulate him from the bottom of our hearts! We thank all the participants who shared this event with us and also we thank a very friendly Caroli Kart Center Nyköping staff for the support! Race documentation is located here.
But our season 10 of the GoKart PRIX Championship will continue on the 6th of May with 2 stages in Karlskoga and Örebro! Registration will open very soon! Stay tuned!