Elation and exhaustion. Two words that come to mind when I think of this first race of our season that took place at Badger Raceway in Dousman this past Sunday. It's sure nice to see the winter weather finally breaking and the season upon us once again. The exhausting part comes from selling your old kart 3 weeks before your first race and having a virtual mountain of things to do before heading out. Combine that with a new trailer that hasn't been looked at for over four months and you find yourself wishing for another couple of weeks.
After working out the bugs with the new chassis, and the 45 pound deficit that we were facing, I was quite surprised to see that Sam found his race legs relatively quick. Although in this new class the bulk of our competition are drivers who have been around for nearly ten years in some cases, he got himself up to a 41.77 lap. This took us nearly half the season last year to get there so I think things look pretty promising. Albeit he is about 3 seconds off the lead group and about 4 seconds off the track record for his class, with some seat time and maybe even some private tutoring I think we can close that gap real soon.
It was a pretty uneventful day with the only problem coming from a fuel tank that decided to purge about a quart of gas all over the kart and Sam. He came in after a practice session with a strange sheen to his suit and helmet. Once I got closer to him and took a good sniff I could quickly tell it was fuel. What I realized was in my desperation to have him make weight I filled the tank as much as I could to use the fuel as ballast. Obviously we found out that this was a very bad idea since the fuel had to seek a comfortable level and when it did, it decided to self vent all over Sam.
He wasn't very happy at all to say the least and once we got him out of his clothes and cleaned up I proceeded to empty about half of the tank's contents in hopes of not having to experience this again. He must have lost a little trust in me because even with a half tank of fuel he wanted me to make a rock solid promise that it wasn't going to happen again. He refused to set foot in the thing until he got it. And honestly, I wasn't even convinced that I fixed the situation completely. After all I still needed the tank as full as possible to assure us a chance at making our minimum class weight. I just crossed my fingers and off he went. I must have done something right that time since he came in dry and almost 3 pounds over the minimum. I'd be lying if i said there was some scientific procedure that went into this. It was good old fashioned luck. Some times us old folks aren't so smart after all.
When the day was finally over we finished fifth and had managed to keep all of the gremlins away that had plagued us since Friday. No spins, no crashes, or unwanted fuel showers. Just a great day to finally be back at it again.
Next, we're off to our first National event in South Bend Indiana on May 5th. It's going to be interesting to see just how good the competition is at this level. I just hope we can be quick and learn something from them. We'll bring all of the news to you as soon as we return.
