Our once pristine kart now has it's first set of battle scars.
When practicing for last Sunday's race, Sam came upon a slower driver who was not very aware of his surroundings. When he went to overtake him on the inside of "the boot" at Badger, this driver came right across the track and chopped off Sam's line and a good portion of our nose in the process. Nothing mechanical was damaged in the altercation but the site of that body scuff is going to drive me nuts until the end of the season.
I had the priviledge many years ago of working with an all around master mind of race car fabrication and chassis prep who asked to remain anonymous. One of his attributes that rubbed off on me is the fact that all of your equipment had to be kept in immaculate condition all of the time. We would wipe down and polish our cars when they came off the track before we'd ever begin to inspect them. After all it did help in identifying potential problems, and a lot of things can be covered under a layer of dirt and grease that could remain hidden until they would bloom into something much larger.
But even though I'm thankful for all that I learned from him in the past, this is one thing that I wish I didn't. Or at least one that I'd pay less attention to later in life. It's almost become an obsessive compulsive disorder for me. And clean, polished, nicely painted equipment doesn't always make it to the finish line first so I don't know why I try so hard. Making it to the finish line first should be the only priority, clean or not. I'm going to try my hardest to live by this but it won't be easy.
