Ameya wins title amid high drama

Rivals claim he engineered a crash which paved the way for his victory

NUVEM (Goa): Amid high drama, three-time National Karting champion Ameya Walawalkar won both races in the fourth round of the MRF-MAI Go Karting championship at Goa on Sunday, virtually announcing himself the winner of the event with one round to spare.

The twin wins of Ameya from Team Mohite’s Racing catapulted his individual score to 166, 51 points ahead of arch rival Rayomand Banajee of Speed Rayo Racing. With today’s win, Mohite’s Racing topped the chart with an insurmountable 419 points. In the first race, Ameya started second but pulled off a scintillating win in a 32-lap drive, arguably the fastest race of the day.

But the actual drama unfolded in the second race when there was a pile-up in the first corner of the track forcing Ghadially to crash and slip out of the race. The eventual losers later blamed Ameya for engineering the crash and who zoomed past unscathed and led from the word go.

Ghadially, however, blamed it on Ameya saying: “If the first car slows down in the mouth of a turn, other cars trailing you simply bundle up. And he just did it to perfection.” He added that a driver of Ameya’s stature should win races by sheer performance and not treachery.”

However, Ameya said: “There was a jerk and my cart slowed down as I went hard on the brakes. My cart showed some problems even yesterday for which I lost my pole position. I never complained. These are technical issues, one should take it sportingly,” he added.

Other results:
INKC-Junior category - Nikhil Kashyap (Bangalore), Abha Mankar (Pune), Vikas Anand (Chennai); Cadet class - Arjun Maine (Bangalore), Dhruv Mohite (Kolhapur); Ladies - Abha Mankar, Sneha Sharma (Mumbai), Malini Chakravarty (Kolkata)