The hare and the tortoise

My Dad was mad about board games. He subscribed to a magazine called 'Games and Puzzles', and made a point of buying the latest games for us to play. As a kid I needed a good board game because there were only three channels on TV, the closest thing we had to a smart phone was in the hall on a table, wired to the wall, and the inventer of the Internet was still at secondary school.

Car related games were popular, like Dealer's Choice (playing the role of dodgy car salesman) and Formula 1 (using your cardboard dashboard to manage tyres, brakes and fuel to get your car round the track). But the game we kept going back to was Hare and Tortoise. No dice. Just tactics to get to the end and win the race. Slow and steady, a constant supply of lettuce and carrots, and the tortoise would invariably beat the hare in the race.

Now Kate's no tortoise, but she's been chipping away at the races in the Medway Valley Kart Club's summer series championship. And although she was lapped in the final during Round one, she's just been getting better and better, and she's just done a brilliant final round, getting a new PB, and she's no longer anywhere near being lapped. The point though, is that many of the fast racers getting podiums haven't done all the rounds, or they've crashed out during some of the heats and missed out on points. And Kate has kept on going, racking up points consistently in every round, which means she's managed to finish P3 in the whole championship. And that's extraordinary for someone who's only been karting for a year, and even more so for someone competing in Senior Rotax.

Alain Prost's mantra was to "win as slowly as possible", and in an odd way, that's exactly what Kate's done. So well done to Kate. And as Jay Fairbrass, the organiser of the championship and head honcho at Medway Valley Kart Club said, Kate should be absolutely delighted. And she definitely is!