Pierre Ragues had a challenging weekend in the popular and competitive Monaco Kart Cup but the Frenchman left the Principality in high spirits.

Pierre was in for a tough time from the very start of the event, experiencing a number of concerns with the set-up of his kart in the first free practice sessions. The team worked long into the evening to find a cure for the problems and some important revisions to the chassis were made to improve driveability.

Pierre found a good feeling with the kart and started to grow in confidence around the demanding Monaco streets. The timed sessions were divided into two groups with Pierre in the first session. It proved to be quite a disadvantage because, although he was fourth quickest in his group, the second session was run in more competitive conditions with increased rubber on the track. This left Pierre down in 17th overall out of 34 drivers.

Some further improvements to the settings allowed Pierre to progress up to 12th for the pre-final and while running in 11th position, after just 10 laps, the race was stopped due to heavy rain that made for impossible driving conditions.

The final still took place, although in wet conditions and with some of the circuit still under cautionary yellow flags. Pierre was up into 8th place with 20 laps to go but he made a mistake on one of the slippery white lines which dropped him back to 14th. Nevertheless, a quick recovery allowed him to gain places and he finished the race in 8th place.

Pierre said: “It was a difficult weekend but I am satisfied with the end result because it has been more than a year since I took part in an international kart race. We had some problems in practice but we worked hard to resolve those. We were unlucky with our timed session because the second session was much quicker with more rubber on the track, but still we made good progress and in the wet conditions, I think 8th was a good result.”