Racing Bahrain eked out a dramatic victory in an immensely gripping first round of the 2018/2019 Bahrain Karting Enduro Championship (BKEC), held at Bahrain International Karting Circuit (BIKC) in Sakhir.
The three-hour event was hotly contested by a massive 21-kart field, and the ending could not have been any more heart-stopping as only nine-hundredths of a second separated the top two finishers at the chequered flag. With top local talents Abdulla Buhindi and Khalid Alsaei behind the wheel of their 390cc Sodi GT4R go kart, Racing Bahrain claimed the narrowest of victories over Go Bahrain as both teams finished with a total of 132 laps, with Racing Bahrain taking first place by a mere 0.091 seconds.The two teams were battling head-to-head from the very start of the meeting, with Racing Bahrain topping the timesheets during Qualifying Practice and Final Qualifying Top 10. But then Go Bahrain, represented by Raed Raffii and Rashed Almuammari, eventually clinched pole position with a 0.043-second gap from Racing Bahrain, who qualified third.
Meanwhile, to add to their podium appearances, Go Bahrain registered the race’s fastest lap of one minute 13.016 seconds. Following the event, all the winners were presented their respective trophies in a podium ceremony. The 2018/2019 BKEC features four hugely exciting rounds of varying durations. Round two is scheduled to take place as a six-hour event on December 1. The third round is then set for two days on January 26 and 27, and it will be a 12-hour race. That leads up to the year’s ultimate challenge, the championship finale and the most highly anticipated event of the season: the 24-hour fourth round, on the weekend of March 1 and 2.
