Kieran Vernon's blog

With much publicity and promise from articles over the winter, and the opportunity to drive for Fluid Motorsport in the works Van Diemen was huge for me this weekend. I was kean to deliver, even with limited testing, with a big winter break?!

Testing was all wet in preparation for the weekend, however the team and I worked well finding a good setup, and we ended the test very fast and confident of our pace in the wet. It was looking good for a weekend, predicted by all the weather forecasts to be a wash out!

However this was not the case! And for the first qualifying session of the season it was dry. I had mixed feelings about this, i was confident in the car i had and in myself, however it was my first proper dry run on the new Dunlop slicks for this season. It proved to be a difficult session, learning how the tyres performed during qualifying wasn’t ideal, and we ended up 9th on the grid.

It seemed it was going to stay dry for race one. My aim was to get to the top 5! I got a great start off the line, passing two cars into turn 1. I then managed to pass Anti Burri by the end of lap 2, leaving myself in 6th position. A spin by Josh Hill promoted me to 5th position. I could see the spectrum of Daniel Cammish in front, however i could not make any attack? on closing the gap, the car had a lot of understeer, and i was still finding my feet with the new dunlop tyres. However 5th is where i finished which was a great result for the first race of the season.

Race two was a hard chase. I got another great start, passing two cars again before turn 1, then promoted to 4thwhen Josh Hill made contact with Scott Pye, out of turn 1 missing the incident, I found myself with a huge gap where the top 3 had got away from the incident. We had made a very big change to the car for this race, to try and get rid of the understeer from race one. The car was hugely different and required me to re think how?I was driving the car. By half distance?I had really got my head around it and was closing down on the top 3, which were all battling for the lead. It wasnt until the last lap until?I managed to reach them, and coming out of druids I managed to overtake Daniel Cammish taking 3rd spot and my first podium in Formula Ford!

Race three was a huge battle between my two team mates Jesse Antilla, James Tucker and Anti Burri in the Enigma Mygale. A race long battle of swapping places lap after lap allowed the top 2 to get away, however?I was?determined to make the podium once again! However on the last lap, a nudge at the end of the straight from my team mate James Tucker into Island send me wide and onto the grass, resulting in a huge off, however luckily only propping up against the tyre barrier. It could have been a big one! The car was beached on the wet grass and mud, resulting in a DNF, which was hugely disappointing.

Overall however the first round of this years championship was very promising, with the limited testing done before the season?I did not expect a podium, and the aim was to get through the first round with good results to work on gaining the budget of the whole season. I feel we have achieved a huge amount and?I am very hopeful that we will be able to gain the funding to compete for the full season. A big thanks to everyone supporting me and everyone who has helped to get me this far. Sitting on the grid in a TKM 5 years ago,?I never would have imagined being a podium finisher in UK Formula Ford!