The first annual TTAC Media Challenge go-kart race happened on Thursday night, and your humble author ended up losing by a frustratingly small margin. Eventually.
Despite seemingly insurmountable logistical problems ( a lack of cars to get us to the track, Matt Farah’s date with a washed-up “actress” that same night in Orange County) 10 of us managed to head out to Miramar Speed Circuit.
Miramar’s karts were a much more appealing alternative to the electric karts at K1 in Carlsbad; the SODI chassis and 6.5 horsepower Honda engines made for “proper” karts, rather than the watered-down amusement park units that most indoor places offer.
The only format being offered by Miramar that night was a 20 minute heat that saw the winner declared via a single fastest lap; in essence, this was an extremely long and tiresome qualifying session. Not that anybody was going to object. Despite starting third on the grid, my own race was fraught with problems
- Not keeping my eyes up. The cardinal rule of driving fast is to look well ahead and through the turns, but I didn’t do it enough.
- I treated the race as a head to head battle rather than running smooth, clean laps and waving people by. Instead, I tried to jockey for position.
- I wrongly assumed that these karts would be more like outdoor karts, which can be balanced with the throttle much more readily, and require precise application of the brakes. Instead, they just needed to be manhandled around certain turns, with a bit of braking in a straight line beforehand. Most turns could be taken flat out.
The first race was handily won by Danny Battaglia of ALG, who clocked off a 30.938. Second place went to another Derek, Derek Joyce of Hyundai with a 31.252, while Blake Z. Rong of Automotive.com (and the lightest of our group) took third with a 31.258. I finished a distant 7th, just behind my main rivals, Matt Farah, Jared Gall of Car and Driver and Jeff Glucker of Hooniverse.com – but at least I wasn’t last. And yes, to confuse my many enemies, and es part of ab elaborate deception scheme, my nickname for the race was “Ray Wert” .
Fortunately, a rematch was proposed, and enthusiastically accepted by all parties. For all the grumbling about sore muscles and stiff joints, everyone seemed eager to contort themselves in a noisy, vibrating deathtrap for yet another 20 minutes, and I wasn’t going to raise any objections – the honor of TTAC was at stake. For the final race, we were all aching, winded and drenched in sweat. The brief period we spent outside in the fresh air ended far too soon as we were called back to grid up for the final race.
With my knees and shoulders already getting sore, I decided to take it easy and focus on getting some good solid laps in. During the break, I noticed that there was a giant TV right above the start-finish line that displayed the latest lap times. I made an attempt to run a few “fast” laps, and then would slow down to try and check my times on the screen as a means of evaluating my performance in real time. The chronograph feature on my watch was used to count down the 20 minutes.
With some good vision habits and careful braking, I managed to climb up the leader board. The first few laps were shaky, as I worked out the proper lines and braking points, but I managed to continuously shave precious milliseconds off my time. All the competitors managed to run within a second of one another, and there were some great battles; Matt and I went back and forth over the course of the race, while Dan and I had a great lead-follow session that saw us going two-wide through a turn before I backed off and let him by. Hyundai’s Derek Joyce, who tracks his Cayman S regularly, proved to be an especially persistent character, similar to Eddie Irvine in his prime. For such a serious track racer, Derek seemed to take the “racing is rubbing” mantra very seriously. After 15 minutes, I was in second place, with race leader Blake Z. Rong ahead of me by a mere .0297 seconds. Unfortunately, I never managed to best Blake’s time, which I’ll attribute to the 40 pound difference between us.
Since Blake didn’t pick a charity, I’ll still be donating my $25 to Gabrielle’s Ride. Next year’s tournament can’t come soon enough.
What kind of electric karts would have been available? There’s an indoor kart place here that uses OTL Storm electric karts and while they’re not what an F1 driver trains in, they’re not amusement park quality. Get about 45-50 mph and there are multiple turns that require careful applications of both throttle and brake.
Electric karts weigh almost twice as much as gasoline powered ones, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of karts.
This just in: Car bloggers have no access to cars, blog at 11(?!)
Aside from the odd logistical issues of getting there, it sounds like a good time was had by all. On the subject of karting, I’ve always found that starting at the very back of the pack allows you to let the field get spread out and then you can warm up, then find a good time when there appears to be a good opening to run your fastest lap.
I’ve also found that keeping the stupid pedal pinned the whole time and using the left foot brake to modulate speed always worked the best for the similarly speced karts I was driving.
My experience with electric kart around here is that they tend to be more even between karts….most places I went to with gas karts seem to have some really good and some really bad ones…
Also electric karts have torque….though with their mass they tend to slide less and rewards smoother driving than being manhandled around the track…
The author mentioned the winner’s weight as the excuse for losing. In print. Twice. One can only imagine how many times it was said at the event to whoever would listen.
Is it just possible that the winner was also a quality driver?
So much for being humble in defeat…..
As one of the *ahem* heavier gents in attendance, we all were talking about the weight disparity.
I hope you were all talking liberal amounts of smack, too. I mean, he was representing TTAC, after all.
Woops, that should be “rule”
If “DEREK KREINDLER LOSES BIG…” isn’t being humble in defeat, I don’t know what is. In any case, it was simply to needle Blake. As he mentioned, we were all ragging on him about his “Superleggera” body composition.
assuming regular cart weight in at about 75Kg + 75Kg ( 150 kg in total ) powered by 6.5 Hp engine additional weight of 40 kg is huge margin to think about… that is like almost 30% weight penalty…
It is a significant penalty that cannot be ignored.
imagine racing 2 miatas (1200kgs ) but one of em got 300+ kg of masonry block on the driver seat ( talking about upset balance ) LOL
not really. On a standard 30 second per lap kart track, ten pounds of additional driver weight is equal to a tenth of a second per lap. Winner Blake Rong weighs about 130. I weigh 270. He beat me 30.991 to 31.117. That means, all things being equal, I was 1.1 seconds per lap faster than him. On the Veloster autocross, I beat him by 4 seconds.
However, major points to Derek for organizing the race. It was a great way to end the trip, and we should have another one every single press junket.
I’ve been on this annoying edit from the comments sections kick lately, not sure why.
“The cardinal sin of driving fast is to look well ahead and through the turns, but I didn’t do it enough.”
If it’s the cardinal sin, then you should want to do it as little as possible, right? Did you mean to say the cardinal sin is to not look well ahead through the turns?
That’s cool to see you all battling it out at MSC. I just moved away from San Diego, but here’s a peek at my personal best on that circuit (29.840s). http://youtu.be/n0vlzB14c70 It’s definitely tougher to get that time with 10 people on track. For future reference, if you schedule it ahead of time, you can do a race for position with a short qualifying round.