23 February - Florida Spring Training Day 3: Learning & Gearing

Even in the age of wireless, digital, microwave communication, the Chinese Telephone is still as effective as it ever was. Moving information through several human beings never was and never will be an efficient means of getting facts from one place to another. So it was no surprise when we rolled up to the gates of the Cooper Motorsports Park at the prescribed time a padlock & chain were cinching them closed. Mike tracked down Curt of National Karting News, who was about 5 hours away and verified that the plan called for us to be there at 9am. We had been considering climbing over the No Trespassing signs to at least walk and inspect the track and had even determined what tools we'd need to to use on which nuts and bolts to quickly and efficiently disassemble the gates, if it came to that.

Before we could do that Mike remembered that a crucial phone number was still in the memory of his phone and when that number was answered we knew we were getting somewhere. It turned out we weren't expected until Wednesday. Once that was cleared up the voice coming out of the tiny speaker in Unger's mobile phone shared the lock's combination with us. Coincidentally (or not), the combination that gave us happened to be exactly what the padlock was already set too and had been for the 45 minutes we had been standing there discussing grand schemes to break into the place. One fairly firm tug was all that was required and the chain fell away and the gates swung open.

The reason the track is so hard to find, we came to learn, is that it is a private track - they don't hold regular races. Memberships are sold for the privilege of using the track for practice. ICCs and TaGs are preferred and four stroke guys with their flimsy crankcases filled with messy oil are politely discouraged. The track itself is smooth, well kept (the owners take pride in its appearance), lacking in any elevation changes (what do expect from a track built on a swamp?) but with a very nice variety of fast and slow corners and a very, very long straight-away.That straight was long enough and the long circuit boring enough that we decided to use only the short circuit for the majority of the tests.

We pretty much spent the day gearing for that long straight. As I would change gears to keep making power down the straight, Dana in learning the track would go out and find more speed in the final corners and be further up the power band earlier in the straight. Mike spent the day much the same way although he had some additional challenges in jetting his ICC for the higher barometric pressure and humidity and a little bit of a brake problem.

By the end of the day both Dana and Mike were getting pretty comfortable with the flow of the track. Dana found that it was easy to establish a rhythm on the 12 turn short course. We hadn't really tried dialing in the chassis at all (although the balance seemed good right off the bat) and Dana was turning good times and hitting 61 mph on that long straight. Mike was doing 74 there and also earned the spin-out-of-the-day award when he locked his brakes entering turn one and backed it into the foam-rubber pillows. We gave him a 9 for style and execution.

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