So here it was at last. The long awaited day had come. Tuesday 27 June 2017, the day top insurance-themed karting event Insurance Endurance came to Grantham’s Private Finance Initiative International Kart Track, the single longest and bendiest kart track in the entire UK.
Expectations could not have been higher and the day could not have disappointed less (or do we mean more?) (basically, it was great). The whole event was a credit to everyone involved, not least sponsors Ignite Systems, Razor Blue, NCI and Wonder Media – and also, of course, the event’s media sponsors Bankstone, you may have heard of them, who also provided beer (but only after everyone had finished racing obviously!)
Thirteen teams representing some of the industry’s greatest and best competed in Sodi GT5 karts, whose 390cc engines took them to speeds of, ooh…, maybe 60mph, on the fast bits.
The common objective that both united and bitterly divided them was to put in as many laps as they could inside the six hours allotted race time. In practice, this turned out to be anything between 258 and 226. Which basically means that first place LAMP’s Champs (representing LAMP Insurance) passed the slowest team (who shall herein remain nameless) about once every twelve minutes.
In this picture you can see the top three teams celebrating wildly. They were in descending order: the aforementioned Lamps Champs, followed a mere 11 laps behind by Ignite Systems who just pipped the mysterious Kart 10 one lap behind in third. Popular musical group Take That came in fourth, just one lap behind Kart 10; but who cares about fourth, right?!
In this picture you can see Elliot Smart of Elite Insurance who recorded the fastest lap time 1:11:19 right near the end of the race – even though he has a beard!
If you’d like to see more pictures you can take a look at the Insurance Endurance twitter feed https://twitter.com/InsuranceEndur1 where there’s a whole bunch of them.
In a future edition of Bankstone News we’ll be posting links to loads more pics and exclusive video footage of the teams in action.
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