With the drifting season (for Singapore) still about three months away, our local drifters Jansen Tan, Adam Toh and Felix Wee of Team Falken Stamford are keeping themselves active with other forms of motorsports, in particular go-karting.

Taking part in a two-hour kart endurance race organised by leading local automotive company HKS Garage R at Kartright Speedway, the trio coolly and calmly wrapped up the race ahead of nine other teams. In addition, Jansen clinched the prize for the Fastest Time of the Day with his best lap time of 46.566 seconds!

The evening started with practice, qualifying and then the two-hour endurance race. Each team was to complete six stints of 20 minutes, so for most teams which only had three drivers, each driver had to go out twice.

Team Falken Stamford was assigned kart No. 3 and was running in third initially, behind Team No. 5 (consisting of Garage R's MD Lawrence Lee, avid cyclist Yusoff and Super Taikyu racer Andy Han) and Team No. 2 (Chew Hock Ngee, Cheng You Zhi and Jeffrey Sim) who were using this as an opportunity to train for the OCBC Corporate Karting Challenge.

Team No. 2 was leading the race when a one-minute penalty was dealt to them for speeding in the pit lane and an incident with the tyre wall slowed them down some too, giving Team No. 5 the chance to take the lead.

Team No. 3 was steadily in third place but caught up to second and then took the lead when Jansen went out. Fastest driver of Team No. 5 was Lawrence, whose best time was 47.2 seconds, and he chose to take the last stint so he could chase race leader Jansen.

Things were getting more exciting as the race end drew near.

Lawrence only had one thing on his mind - to catch Jansen. He was closing in on Jansen when misfortune struck. The right front wheel axle of the kart broke!

Crawling back into the pit lane, Lawrence switched to another kart but precious time was lost and Team No. 5 was dropped out of the title chase.

Team No. 2 was fervently hunting down Team No. 3 but Jansen was simply too fast and brought home the kart first. Who says drifters are only fast sideways? ;)

The top three winning teams earned a cute trophy for themselves as well as vouchers from Garage R.

Althought it was only a two-hour endurance race, it was enough to see how crucial strategy and also luck is in racing. Team No. 2 were the fastest for sure, but incidents and penalties brought them down. Team No. 5 had a good chance too, but a kart mishap killed their chance. Hence it was Team No. 3 who never gave up and continued chasing.

The question on everyone's mind was - When's the next race?

For more photos, view them on my Facebook album here.