South African Cristiano Morgado won the Masters category of the Rotax Max Challenge World karting championship in Al Ain on Saturday, November 26.

The highly-talented 32-year-old driver from Durban dominated the week-long meeting in the DD2 Masters category at this challenging venue near Abu Dhabi, and led from start to finish after setting the pace in all his preliminary heats.

The Rotax Max Challenge World Finals is the biggest karting event in the world, contested by 60 countries. Morgado's victory is his second Rotax World Championship win, as he won the Senior Max category for South Africa in the 2004 series.

"It was a perfect championship for me," said Morgado. "I was on the pace right from the go when we started the qualifying and heat races earlier in the week and won all my preliminary rounds going into the final. I got a good start, pulled out a small gap and just tried to keep it that way, although the guys were getting closer to me all week long.

"Towards the end of the 21 lap final, those laps seemed to take forever. It was a case of keeping focussed. It was great to come back to karting this year and win another world title. I want to pay tribute to my father and the Odendaals from Durban who helped me in Al Ain with all the chassis prep-work throughout the week."

Another South African to fare brilliantly in this event, contested by some 260 drivers, all of whom are champions in their home countries, was Pretoria's Marc Murray. Murray finished 5h in the most competitive and fastest class of all, the DD2 Gearbox category. After winning one of his preliminary races, Murray was looking good for a win in the final, but a broken seat mounting just took the edge of his pace in the closing stages, affecting the kart's handling.

He had the consolation of setting the fastest lap of the championship. An idea of how competitive this class is, is illustrated by the fact that, while officially classified fifth, he finished only 1,3 seconds behind the winner, Pier-Luc Oulette of Canada. And in fact, Marc was given the exact same race time as fourth-placed Damian Ward of Australia, calculated to within one-thousandth of a second! The top top-ten finishers in this event were covered by just 4,9 seconds!

The other South African members of the eight-driver team suffered mixed fortunes. Most unlucky of all was young Bedfordview driver Aston Hare, who placed consistently in the top six of the Junior Max category in the elimination rounds. Unfortunately a massive first lap incident sidelined him from the final. The other South African Junior Max contender, Luke Herring, struggled all week and never found a competitive race set-up, due, perhaps to his inexperience in racing in Max Challenge, which is far and away the most competitive kart series in the world.

In the Senior Max category, South Africans Chad van Beurden and Ryan Frost were both looking very competitive in practice, but both were involved in an accident in the early qualifying heats and never recovered fully, having to fight their way through from the back of the field. Van Beurden finished 20th in Max Challenge, and again, to illustrate how tight this racing is, he was only 16 seconds behind the race winner, Ben Cooper of the UK. Ryan Frost finished 26th in this category.

Eugene Brittz looked promising for South Africa in the DD2 final, having finished the pre-final in an impressive sixth place, but he got tangled in an accident and ended a disappointing 28th. Ian Young, also of South Africa, struggled for early pace during the week, and, although he improved as the week went on, ended up 21st.

A fine performance in the DD2 Masters category was put up by South Africa's second entrant in this class. John van Wyk, a 47-year-old investment banker from Johannesburg, has only been racing for four years, and, competing against much younger drivers, his 18th place was notable.

South African Rotax distributor Ed Murray said this World Final was the most impressive yet in terms of sheer spectacle, numbers and the competitiveness of all the drivers. Murray was proud of South Africa's performance in coming third in the Cup of Nations at Al Ain, behind Australia and Canada. He was concerned, however, that despite South Africans having now won some 10 World titles in the senior categories of this annual series, held since 2000, SA has never won a junior title.

"The biggest problem is that we run conflicting karting series in our country, which never allows our youngsters to be exposed to fields of more than 20 competitors at a time. This is why some of our younger drivers are out of their depth when exposed to an event of this magnitude, because the competitiveness in South Africa is effectively halved due to our motorsport organisers allowing so many series and classes to be run in our country."

The Rotax series, which allows only completely standard engines, is far and away the most successful karting series in the world. Since its inception in the late 1990s, over 70 000 Rotax karting engines have been sold world-wide. The strict control of standard engine specifications thus puts the onus on driving and fine-tuning of a select number of kart chassis which are homologated for the series. Thus cheque-book racing is kept to a minimum in this series, where aspiring world champions (or rather their parents) can afford to hire the best engine tuners to give their youngsters an unfair advantage.