Points race #14 was held at the Briggs and Stratton Motorplex nestled inside the confines of Road America Raceway in Elkhart Lake Wisconsin. To anyone who hasn't seen this facility you are missing an absolutely beautiful place to enjoy a race. To those of you who have you'll agree when I say this is by far the best race track in the country.A big plus for us was the fact that the Elkhart Lake Vintage Festival was going on at the same time as our event. All day you would be entertained with the sights and sounds of race cars of a bygone era streaming by at break-neck speeds. Everything from old Formula One and Indy Cars to Bugattis and Bug Eyes were there. And as valuable as the cars were you could count the number of driver's who pampered them on one hand. For the most part they were all driving these things the way they were meant to be driven - flat out! Case in point. A magnificent Group C car with a Judd V10 was just screaming around the track on Saturday when he blew a tire and vaporized most of his bodywork. Rumor had it he Duct taped what was left back together and continued on. But enough about the fortunate few and on to what the lower budgeted little guys do on the weekend.
Follow the leader. We all do it from time to time. I used to get a chuckle out of messing with our competition when I worked for a race team years ago. When you are fortunate enough to be running up front, your cars (or karts) are closely scrutinized by everyone. When you have a particular part or set-up that's in plain sight, chances are someone will mimick it real fast. We used to put absolutely stupid things on our cars to see who at the next race would be sporting this new item that must be helping us go so fast. They may never have known just what advantage we were getting out of it if any, just that if it worked for us it must work for them. I bring this up because this weekend a couple of situations were based on following someone's lead. One example was a good lesson in not always trusting what your competition is doing, and the other is keeping your head in the game and not developing tunnel vision.
This weekend we had the rare chance of having the WKA Manufacturers Cup National Champion in HPV Jr. Sportsman at the track competing against us. He's number one, numero uno, the big cheese, there's no one better than him in the entire country, and he's all of 10 years old! Man, if I thought that our points leader was hard to chase down then you could imagine that this driver was impossible to catch. From the drop of the flag he pulled away from the field so easily you couldn't help but wonder what a "national" motor had in it that ours didn't. I can't speak for anyone else's equipment, but ours has about 12 races on it, no rebuild, not even a refreshening, and is anticipating a nice winter's nap. I would assume anyone running nationals has their equipment gone through every few races but even so, you couldn't take away the fact that this kid could drive.
Where it gets silly is when some of the competition (myself included) started noticing different tricks on his kart and thought we might gain from them. A very wide stance on the rear end, a seat that was barely bolted to the chassis, and so on. These things probably all worked for him and his kart but could they work for us or was I falling for the placebo effect that we had placed on our competition so many years ago? We all returned to the grid an hour later with a variety of his tricks incorporated and not one of us gained a thing from it. One of the fathers in our class even said he was almost a half second slower with the new set up. The moral of this story: never follow the leader and just stick to what works for you. I'm still asking myself How I could have given in to that!
The second example is alot funnier and before I tell you let me explain the B&S Motorplex. This track can be configured in about 10 different ways. If you look at the track map it looks like an airport with taxiway and runways everywhere. Where you are going to go is dictated by bright orange pylons that they'll set out to change the track for any given weekend. We've competed there three times already in the past year and every time we've gone the track has been different.
With the champ well out in front of Sam and our closest rival James, the only race was really for second and third. James was about 6 kart lengths ahead of Sam but in a truly amazing show of effort Sam kept him pretty much in his sights all weekend. He really was doing well and like other races in the past, he consistently brought his times down every session and became more comfortable with drifting the kart through corners verses steering it. It really appeared that he brought his A-Game this weekend until about 5 laps into the race when James takes a wrong turn. I don't know what happened but James decided to leave out about two corners of the track and go through some pylons and wouldn't you know it Sam followed right behind him. He later told me that he was concentrating so hard on the back end of James' kart that he followed him right off course! The flag man was immediately drawn to this and before he looked like he was going to impose some sort of penalty to either of them, he just threw his arms up and let it go. No one really benefited from it, and the leader of the race was about 20 kart lengths ahead of both of us so what did it matter if we now were only 19 kart lengths away.
All in all I thought it was a great weekend. My wife and I love to come to this track any time we can. There's alot of memories here from when I used to drive, and this track was always our favorite. The weather held out nicely unlike what the forecasters were saying (what a surprise) and with the fine show going on out on the big track there was plenty to watch during your down time. As for our daughter, well she loves traveling period. Put her in a hotel down the street from our house and she'll think she's on vacation. Living out of a suitcase gets old for some folks but I can't see that happening with her anytime soon.
