31 August - Who's Olga And What Is She Doing In Our Kart?
Visitors to this site who pay attention to detail my have seen a couple references to "Olga" in pop up captions on the action pics around the site. Or maybe when checking out the club point standings where "Olga Conlin" has recently moved up to fifth place. Or maybe even at the track where announcer Beth Hopkins has used it a time or two.

Where did this come from? Apparently from Sean's mom, Erin Dillon, who bestowed it on Dana upon seeing her for the first time in her keep-cool braids. The new nickname seems to fit - in her braids she does resemble one of those cute Eastern-Block gymnasts from back before The Wall came down. So it was inevitable that the new moniker would stick and start showing up on the Conlin SpeedSports web site, the club's points page (her sister Julie is the club points keeper, after all) and now on the flanks of the kart.

25 August - Getting Closer...
There was a time, not too long ago, that if we were starting on the front row the best we would dare hope for would be to be leading out onto the backstraight for the first lap. But after lot of hard work and lots & lots of very valuable advice and suggestions from our racing friends (some of which are competitors!) we've gotten to the point where we can almost let ourselves think a win is possible.

We were certainly entertaining that thought as Dana cranked off 4+ laps leading 12 other karts in the first heat race. A lead big enough at one point to prompt at least one spectator to say that Dana was "walking away with this race". But, alas, it took a while but Jason Karr was able to thread his way through traffic and get by Dana at turn Eight. The combination of Jason's driving and his dad Roger's kart prep just puts them on a different level from the rest of us mere mortals. We're not sure what it is that makes that package so good but you can be sure we'll be studying the in-kart video footage of the couple laps Dana followed him while finishing second.

The second heat was a totally different story. Starting 12th, Dana was able to move up two positions before getting trapped behind one of the Buckeye Kart Club guys who was running a kart set up for oval racing. With Circleville Raceway Park's seven left-hand turns and only three right ones, this was kind of a cool experiment to see just how competitive an oval kart could be on this road course. Unfortunately, we were right behind the experiment and it pretty much ruined Dana's race. The oval kart was visibly faster through all the left handers but diabolically unpredictable in the right handers and Dana couldn't find a safe way by. The result was instead of running her usual low 51 second laps, she was turning 53s and getting very, very frustrated. She finished tenth.

For the feature she was gridded a respectable fourth but on the first lap lost a position to Jacob Gearhart (who, on the last lap of the feature, turned 49 second lap - geez, maybe Karr does have a challenger) but was able to maintain her position despite a pretty heated attack from BKC driver Troy Chamberlain. John Fox, who was trying to do one race too many on his tires, was fading from the lead pack and for a while it looked like Dana might catch him but she completely ran out of laps before John completely ran out of tires. Still, a fifth out of 13 entries? We'll take that anytime.

Tracy and I were seemed to be busy all day with a couple breakages and some set up changes between races but working together we were able to get everything done without too much drama. Being able to hand-off tasks to Tracy was a big help as well as being able to bounce ideas off each other regarding set up changes.

The only real problems we had all day was in our entertainment division. After getting good video footage of the pretty boring first heat, we got nothing of the very exciting second heat because we forgot to turn the camera off after the first heat! So when we turned the camera on for Heat 2 there was no tape left to record on! For the final, we got wonderful footage of the pace lap and first couple turns at which point one of the straps that hold the camera in place slipped down onto the battery release. A few seconds later the battery flung out into the grass at turn Four where we later retrieved it. I'm glad we don't race like we make movies.

And as for our "extended" team, Sean was able to win his heat and feature in convincing style powered by a new Honda engine on loan from Mike Long. He needs to work on his victory donuts though. Joe Fagan, though he wasn't able to beat Dana in the first heat, managed to finish second behind Karr in the feature and increased his points margin over Julie's big sister.


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