The final round of the 2011 World karting championship has officially begun. This morning the Suzuka circuit featured free practice sessions for the 20 participants at the Japanese event. Adding to a rather "slim" list of confirmed drivers there are also some local wild cards.

LIVE! Updates from Suzuka
Click HERE to read all the updates collected by our reporters today.

The Entry list got slimmer
All eyes are obviously set on the championship leader  Nyck De Vries (Zanardi/Parilla) and his closest ranking rival, Alexander Albon (Intrepid/TM). But the Tony Kart/Vortex trio il also on the move - with Ignazio D'Agosto, Flavio Camponeschi, Yu Kanamaru - as is the Birel-RK/BMB couple, made up by Libor Toman and Karol Basz. Of course, an eye also goes to Sebastien Bailly and Zdenek Groman, the Kosmic/Vortex knights. The "official CRG" is absent. The factory team headed by Giancarlo Tinini no longer seems to favour a category like today's KF1. According to rumors, Tinini is seriously considering also avoiding next year's 2012 edition of the KF1 World series, thus confirming the meaning of their absence from this last Japanese round. The list of confirmed drivers features a grand total of 11 Japanese pilots, who deserve serious attention given that they can use their deep knowledge of the circuit to their advantage. standing out above all is the already mentioned Yu Kanamaru, winner of one world match, but a note of mention also goes to Hiroaki Watatani (Wildkart/Maxter), who took aprt in all other matches of this 2011 World series.

Extra Free practice sessions
This morning featured extra free practice sessions, not officially scheduled. The official program should have started at 2:50 pm local time, in the afternoon. But all participants made an agreement with the organiser to obtain extra sessions in the morning to have sufficient trial time to allow the matrial to "settle in", key to get the best out of the official free practice sessions. this is the comment by Dino Chiesa (Chiesa Corse - Zanardi/Parilla), one of the initiative's promotors along with Ronni Sala (Birel Motorsport): "We travelled thousands of kilometres to come here, so it would have been silly to miss out on a morning of practice. We were already ready to go, both logistically and mechanically, yesterday afternoon. According to schedule, today we would have had to waste the whole morning. So we collected signatures from all participants willing to do extra practice sessions, which are key to run in engines and inspect equipment."

The rain is coming
After a sunny Tuesday and Wednesday, today, thursday November 10th, the sky chas clouded up. Now that it's late afternoon and all scheduled events are over, we are expecting rain, which will probably wash over the Suzuka circuit also tomorrow, Friday november 11th. Instead, the forecast for Saturday and Sunday is cloudy skies with no rain.