This is our third class in our third year. HPV Junior is where he'll be competing this season. The class is for 12 to 15 year old drivers and uses the same powerplant that we had last year but with a much larger carb and pipe combination.
Larger carb + Larger Pipe = Large Power. We started with a 4-cycle Briggs and took an entire season to get up to speed. We then started our second season with a 2-cycle HPV and took all year to get quick. Now we start our third year with yet another deficit to tackle. Although it's the same kart and engine, it's going to feel alot different with it not being as heavily restricted as it was. Even though the class runs on average about 3 seconds quicker than we did last year, I'm confident he'll find his stride quickly enough. I sure hope he does anyway. We're planning on trying ourselves against some of the top national drivers in the Midwest Sprint Series and the WKA Manufacturers Cup division. When we first planned our season for '07 we had just National races on our docket. If you now check out our schedule you'll notice we've rearranged it a bit. A couple select Nationals have been dropped in favor of competing at our home track in Dousman a few times. This was done not only because I'm having my doubts in just throwing him to the wolves, but also because one of my co-workers has purchased a kart package for his son and we plan on doing some weekends together.
I'm really looking forward to this season because for the first time since we started out in this sport there is no pressure to win. We're not chasing points at Badger, and we're not heading into any of the national races with the intention of doing anything other than staying up with some, if not all of them. I told Sam that since this is most likely going to be the class that he spends the next 4 years in, we have plenty of time to be great. Let's just practice being really good for now.
