August 28, 2006

Points Race #12

Another day, another lesson learned. Loose is fast! Tight is not.

It's not that I never knew this. I mean it's more or less the mantra of karting. It's just that I thought we had the kart as loose as we were ever going to be. What I learned this weekend is what I learn any other time that I become complacent and feel I know what I'm doing and that is, I'm wrong again.

My son and I were just talking this weekend about how he misunderstood me when we got into this sport. He thought that I said since I had 12 years of auto racing experience under my belt, this kart thing was going to be a breeze. For the record I never said that in those exact words. I think it may have been more along the lines of me feeling that with less equipment to have to dial-in this would be simpler than anything I had worked on in the past. On the contrary karting is much more complex and challenging than anything my Formula Ford could have thrown at me. And I mean no disrespect to the Ford guys. It's not like you just show up at the track and throw fuel in your car and race. There is plenty for you to do as well. It's just a different animal. Someone once told me something along the lines of this: If you only have three things to do verses sixteen, those three things being done right are going to be that much more crucial in the outcome of your efforts. The less you have to do, the more you have to be absolutely perfect at each one of them. I think we were actually talking about drivers in road racing verses drag racing, but I think you could apply this theory to the guys turning the wrenches as well. The less you have to work with, the harder it is to get the results you're looking for.

Up until recently I thought that I had my end of things sealed up for this season. I believed that everything I could do to give Sam the best kart possible had already been done and now it was time for him to step-up his game and show me something. All the fine tuning was going to come from him in getting our lap times down further. Wrong yet again!

Jim Bennett, father of James (who is leading our class in points), comes up to me in practice and says we need to do something to loosen our kart up and get Sam through the corners easier. He noticed Sam was holding the steering wheel in a constant position through the corner and that the kart was never "pitching" into the corner. It was more like plowing. Shorter hubs and a track adjustment then back out we go but not before making Sam realize that the kart was now going to slide around a bit more than he may be used to. And slide it did, but through all of this we still managed to consistently lower our lap times. Now that the first plan of attack is complete it's on to Phase II.

With the back end taken care of we now had to narrow up the front track in an attempt to get it to slide around just a bit more. It looked really good in the last session but we thought there were still gains to be made. We sent him out on his final run of the day and noticed a big difference. He now just had to flick the steering wheel slightly into the corner then bring it back straight, allowing the kart to drift through the turns instead of being steered through them. This was no easy task for him and in one occassion it sent him looping off course with his eyes as big as saucers in his helmet! He managed to keep it running and finish the race but the most important thing for me was the fact that now the attitude of our kart was looking more like what I was so used to seeing with James.

For the most part we actually have a new kart. One that doesn't act like the kart of old at all. That one was too safe, too comfortable, and slow at best. With this new set up we have a kart that is going to require a little more work to drive right and a little more guts to accept. Sam almost has to teach himself to drive all over again but I'm not really worried about it though. Through all of this he still managed to keep his times fairly consistent and low. We never beat our personal best that we set out to do today, but I feel what we got instead is far more valuable. With a little more work and the time to get comfortable with it again, he'll be well on his way to the 41's that we felt we'd never get.

August 24, 2006

Points Race #11


All I can say is that it's good to get back to some kind of normalcy. Even if it was a bittersweet weekend of sorts.

In our usual fashion we finished second in our feature and managed to consistently bring our lap times down session after session. This, combined with the fact that we had relatives in attendance who flew in from out of town for our family reunion, made for the sweeter portion of our day.

Sam was definitely on his mark all day, posting lap times in the mid 42 second range. Not to take anything away from his efforts but for the first time this season they started the faster class behind us for a change. In HPV Jr. Sportsman there are so few entries that the club has been combining other classes in with us. Until this weekend they were doing split starts with the faster group out front. Now having changed that, Sam was faced with faster and older drivers bearing down on him at a very rapid rate. This must have been just the motivation that he needed to perform as well as he did. You could tell he really didn't want this bunch to catch him. This change just may have been what the doctor ordered to light a fire under him and get us going faster.

On the bitter end of things we found out that our frame is indeed bent. We'd been speculating on it since his crash at Blackhawk but weren't absolutely sure until this weekend when we had the kart on a flat pad and scales. It's very minor but just enough to have thrown the front end out of alignment, leaving Regan Vehring of 4-Cycle Central to come up with an alternate way to straighten everything back to as close to normal as possible. Mission accomplished though as the kart never appeared to be sluggish or darty and Sam never complained of feeling anything out of the ordinary. It never fails though. Last season we had an 8 year old well used chassis and ran it into a variety of things. Never once did it appear to be bent. This season with a brand spankin' new chassis we run into someone just once and the outcome is totally different. It's kind of like not being able to pay someone to crash into your $100 beater car but the moment you pony up the 30 grand for a new one, a rogue shopping kart finds your shiny new passenger door.

Anyway Sam and I want to thank everyone in our family who showed up this weekend, especially Frank Jr. who helped out all day in the pits and back at our trailer. I think we're safe to say that he enjoyed himself as much as we enjoyed having him. And I think I can recall hearing him mutter the words "I'd like to get me one of these" a few times so maybe, just maybe, some day there will be another Marmurowicz blazing a trail at an Atlanta area kart track sometime soon.

August 07, 2006

Murphy's Law couldn't have been more prevalent!

Anyone who has ever been involved in any form of motorsport will read this post and immediately relate to it. Resting on the old adage: "That's racing".

In no way was I myself or my son ever promised that anything in this life comes easy. We've never expected it to be but it would just be nice to catch a break every now and then. I've written about bad times before but nothing compares to this last event at Blackhawk Farms Raceway. We've had bad days before but never three consecutive days in a row! Were the gods angry at me? And if I did something to deserve this why punish my entire family for it? It really started to look like someone upstairs had it in for us or was trying to test us in some way.

We decided to leave for the track on Thursday night to get an early start on Friday's all day practice session. That night we spent sleeping on the floor of the trailer and it should have been some indication of things to come but how comfortable can one be in a trailer anyway? We woke to what looked like a fine day of practice. A little warm, but sunny and not a cloud in the sky. The only tiny drawback was that all of us were a bit sore, under rested, and in need of a shower.

Sam took to the track in his first session of the day but never came around for his first lap. I hunted down an official and he told me there was a report of a driver off in turn three and that he was out of the kart and OK. What could have gone wrong? Everything was checked and double checked before he went out so it must have spun on cold tires I thought. I wouldn't get to really know until the end of the session so the important thing for now was the fact that he's fine.

The truck and trailer came down the track carrying back to us one filthy Margay kart and one dejected driver. On the outside it looked like what took place was a simple spin off course into a really wet area. I mean there was grass and mud on every square inch of the thing. On the contrary, what had happened he said was that another driver much further up the track from him had spun off course and then right back on in front of him. Sam didn't have alot of room to get by him and eventually made contact with his right rear, almost kicking himself clear out of the seat. Hearing this I attempted to spin the rear wheels and confirmed my worst expectations - the axle was indeed bent, 4 teeth were ground off of the sprocket, and we had a severely deformed brake rotor. Pretty much the entire back end was broken or bent in some way.

I walked what seemed like the entire paddock and eventually found all of the parts we needed. In the process I also managed to consume all of the cash that we had with us for the weekend! What was equally bad was the fact that what had originally been thought of as being a quick fix took almost four hours of our day to correct. The axle I found was not for a Margay and the keyways didn't line up properly. This forced us to become creative with how we had to offset it to make everything else line up. With this done we returned to the track for only two short practice sessions that were left in the day but never really reached our stride. We decided to toss in the towel, check in to our hotel, and get some much needed rest.

Our bad luck continued on Saturday when we failed to get to the track in time for our first of two scheduled practice sessions. When the second session finally came we never even made it out of the pits with what was thought to be a suspected fuel delivery problem. No need for panic, we're just going to have to fix it and hope that our intended set-up is going to work for our race today. Unfortunately for us the disappointment wouldn't stop there. When the green flag finally flew on our race Sam managed to drive the kart about 100 feet before it coughed and died on him again. With the help of several individuals along pit row we repeatedly tried to start it and get him back on the track but to no avail, it just wouldn't stay running.

Sick with the thought that I finally had something wrong with the kart that I couldn't diagnose, I took the carb off and brought it to Don from L.A.D. Specialties. He spent nearly the entire afternoon helping us out and answering all of our questions while we tried time after time to put it together and pull it apart in our quest to make this engine run again. I can't thank him enough for his knowledge and all of his help because by 5pm when the track closed for the day we finally had a kart that would move again under it's own power. We all went back to the hotel very optimistic in our chances for tomorrow's race.

Now it's one thing to experience bad luck at the track, but it's totally another issue when it seeps into your personal life as well. It's about 3am and we're all awakened by a drunken lover's spat in the hotel room next to us. After about an hour of listening to their shouting and banging I decide to skip my intended idea of strangling them myself and call the front desk instead. Problem solved. At least for an hour until they chimed up again but I think we were all so beat we were finally able to sleep right through it.

The alarm at 6am came way too soon. We all got up, showered, and got ready to check out when my son noticed how dark it was for 6:30 in the morning. It did seem strange to me at the time but I just discounted it as overcast skies and continued to pack the truck to get to the track. It wasn't until my wife looked at her watch and noticed that it was 5:30am that we truly knew why it was so dark. Now I remember. Before we went to sleep the night before I had a problem with the alarm clock in the room and mistakenly set the time ahead by an hour. Yesterday we were late, and now today we have more than enough time. This all wouldn't matter anyway as the rain began to fall just as we got to the track and eventually washed out all racing for the day.

So there you have it. Several hundred dollars later and only two sessions out on the track. The only thing that we learned from this weekend is that it's going to take a lot more than this to break us. And do you want to know the biggest farce of it all? For making it just barely past the timing and scoring tower in our race on Saturday, Sam was awarded with his very first win. It seems that in our race group of about 6 classes Sam was the only one registered in HPV Jr. Sportsman. All he had to do was take the green flag to receive a first place finish and a nice plaque to show for it. I would have rather looked back on this as a nail-biting back and forth fight to the finish with him being the ultimate winner but when you think of it, this isn't all that bad of a story either.