Looking back at the successful year that 2013 was, we here at Canadian Karting News decided to create our own set of awards, all pertaining to categories we feel worthy. Throughout the final weeks of 2013, we will highlight an award for categories such as Junior and Senior driver’s of the year, helmet design of the year, Canadian event of the year, best appearing kart among many others.
While these are all the opinion of CKN, you can let us know who you think deserved each award. Using the comments below each article, let us know who you feel was worthy of the award and a short blurb why you believe so.
*Helmet Paint Job of the Year*
Nominee’s:
– Austin Boyle (Polen Designs)
– Kevin Monteith (LSDesigns)
– Parker Thompson (Lucky Design)
– Austin Riley (Polen Designs)
– Elvis Stojko (SMART Race Paint)
– Robert Wickens (SMART Race Paint)
Winner: Austin Boyle
This award is meant to fun for us here at the CKN office, but it turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. Selecting a helmet paint job as our favourite of the year had us narrowing down our selection from a massive amount of beautiful helmets that made their debut in 2013.
Coast to coast we saw beautiful livery hit the track from a wide array of helmet painters with Canadians truly setting themselves apart from the competition, at least with their on track presence.
While we admit a helmet cannot actually earn a driver results, there is a certain swagger that a new lid does present. Kevin Monteith received his new LSDesigns lid trackside at Mosport for the opening round of the Eastern Canadian Karting Championship and it may or may not have helped him earn the weekend sweep in Rotax Senior. Robert Wickens turned in the keys of his Mercedes DTM car for a kart race in Las Vegas and his new SMART Race Paint helmet earned the pole-position and top-five in a stacked Rotax DD2 class at the SuperNationals, while Parker Thompson had a bucket painted by world renown Lucky Race Paint and it brought him some serious results in his debut year in Europe with the factory Energy Corse team.
But the winner of our favourite paint job in 2013 goes out to Micro-Max driver Austin Boyle and his Polen Designs helmet. Making his debut on the track this year, Boyle put American painter Austin Polen to work on a special job to promote sponsors KMC Wheels and Sparco. The result was a beautiful double-sided masterpiece and our outright favourite.
Shoutouts also go to Austin Riley, another Polen Designs helmet, and Elvis Stojko (SMART Race Paint). Both drivers tasked their particular painters with paint jobs close to their hearts and both were delivered with an end product that was a special memento.
So whether your paint job is for pure aesthetics, sponsorship presentation, or a cause close to your heart, keep em coming in 2014 and we will once again showcase them at the end of the year!
