Having raced competitively since 2013, Oscar Targett is making waves in the motorsport community. His already impressive wrap sheet has seen him cut his teeth in the Australian Micro Max Championship and work his way through a number of Australian Karting competitions to compete in the sport’s top level KZ2. He is now among the talented drivers in the Grove Junior Team.
The FIA World Championship concluded the last of Oscar's races in Europe for this year. He came away with some brilliant results finishing P20 in a field of 126 drivers.
"Practice: Wednesday and Thursday consisted of 8 x 10 minute practice sessions where we worked on both the kart and myself. Throughout the whole of Wednesday I was well within the top 30 but needed more out of the entire package. As we worked through Thursday we improved until we made it into the top 15 overall in the final practice. Both myself and the team were happy with this progress but needed to make sure we could continue it for the rest of the weekend.
Qualifying: P9 in my group and P34 overall was not the result we wanted from qualifying. A bit of bad luck also contributed to this due to the way that the 4 qualifying groups were merged instead of being ranked by your lap time. This put 15 drivers ahead of me who did a slower lap time and meant we had to start each heat from the 5th row.
Heats: Throughout my 7 heats there were many up and down moments. Throughout all of my races I had great starts and moved forward every time. A very fast paced first heat on Friday afternoon where I held my position in 9th was followed by two more solid results where I would finish 8th and 6th. Saturday morning things got difficult. As I was pushed out for the first heat of the day a large rain shower fell with the entire field on slick tyres. Coming around to start lap 4 I made a mistake from 8th position and was stuck in the grass. After I got out of my kart, got it back on the track and restarted, I was only able to recover to 25th. Another difficult heat Saturday morning where I would finish 12th put us on the back foot and we needed some good results. The final two heats I scored 10th and 8th but it still wasn’t enough to secure myself a place in the final. My Group (B) was the only group to do all 7 heats and qualifying on our 6 slick tyres whilst the other 7 groups had completed at least one race on wets. This resulted in us being a fair chuck behind with tyre wear so the Super Heat had to be a good one.
SuperHeat: After the heat races, I was 37th overall and needed a clean race if I wanted to make the final. After some very late braking moves and another rapid start I was able to move from 19th to 11th and run with the same pace as the leaders. This placed me 33rd on the grid for the final.
Final: Starting from P33 both myself and the team knew that we had the pace to move forward. A good start and a fast lap one allowed me to move up to 28th. Continued good pace and overtakes throughout the race saw me finish my first World Championship in 20th. To qualify for 8 out of the 10 finals I contested this year whilst improving all year and learning so much has been an amazing experience."
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