Gold Star #9 for Karel van Duijvenboden

March 20, 2007, by Karel van Duijvenboden

The last karter left to be mentioned is me, Karel van Duijvenboden. Maybe the virus could only attach itself to Dutch hosts after all then, or perhaps the source of contamination was the Thalys train that we travelled with. Either way I was the third karter to be active in Non NBT, after getting back home from Paris. I lost in the small DP1 battle taking place at the event, but that didn't stop me from continuing to play the course. I was more or less aiming for a sub 1'16 5-lap in the long term, knowing it would be feasible if I could get 15"1x laps consistently. This was not yet the case and my previous PR stood at 1'16"19, so I expected a lot of low 1'16 efforts first. How wrong I was though, within the hour I reached out and got the exact PR I wanted by finishing just one 5-lap: You guessed it right, 1'15"99. Before going to Paris I drove a slightly more spectacular PR though. At VL2, I tried to finish a flap with the Big island-jump trajectory, not yet knowing if it would be even possible on PAL. The early signs weren't promising, but out of the blue I landed all the islands and lived to tell the tale, which immediately earned me a new WR of 9"14*!! As the NTSC jump after was understandably a bit cautious, this opens up a lot of new potential on the course and perhaps even a sub 9 flap will see the light of day on a PAL system sometime in the future. I won't make it a habit to give myself prizes for the Non NBT Trophy cabinet, however after becoming the first karter to finish the nearly impossible Big island-jump on PAL, I guess the gold star award (which is specifically invented for special achievements after all) has got to be a given here. ;-)