Karthikeyan wins Brands Hatch GP

Brands Hatch, May 04: The fastest Indian on wheels, Narain Karthikeyan did India proud by winning the A1 Grand Prix in Brands Hatch, Great Britain on Sunday.

After the win in China last year, this is Karthikeyan’s second win of the season. Karthikeyan, who earlier helped India secure its first ever pole position, led the team to the 10th spot with 61 points out of 22 countries. Britain finished at second spot in the race.

It was Karthikeyan versus Robbie Kerr throughout and the Indian won the battle through a brilliant second pit stop.

The Indian, starting at pole at the grid, finished the 48-lap race in 1 hour 7 min 24 seconds to bring home a total of 21 points -- 15 from feature and 6 from sprint, where Karthikeyan finished fifth in the morning.

This powered India to its first A1GP top-10 finish as they edged past USA, Portugal and China to be perched on 10th place on the championship table.

The second pit-stop in lap 32 proved instrumental in Karthikeyan`s win as he beat the host nations` Robbie Kerr at the break to go ahead and eventually grab the lead with 10 laps to go.

It was smooth sailing after that as he maintained the lead and secured India`s second win of the season.

It also crushed Robbie Kerr`s hopes of a double win after the Briton had won the sprint race in the morning. Kerr finished second behind Karthikeyan with a marginal gap of 1.078.

Swiss Neel Jani finished third with a timing of 1:07:33.416. However he had already sealed the championship for his nation when he finished behind in sprint race in the morning.

An elated Karthikeyan said he was happy with his performance and blamed the tyres for dropping behind in the Sprint.

"I always knew we had a car to be in the top three. I am happy with the performance. This is the last race of the season and last performance with this car. It is quite exciting," he said after the qualifying the session. There was some problem in the tyre in the Sprint and that`s why we dropped to fifth. It was a bit off or may be I did not warm it up enough," Narain said.