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2003 MSOKC HPV Champions

03 April - Picking Up Speed
Tracy finding her speed.
Our day at the track started early and nowhere near the track. It was 7:45am or thereabouts when we sat down at the Bob Evans at I270 and Rt161 with a few of our NW side co-racers. It's always nice to trade stories with your fellow racers and in this case it was Roberto Zayas, Chris Putman, Karl Hans, Tom Hickey, Jed Aston, Tracy, Dana and I.
Dana reviews her lap times on the dashboard display.
On the way out to the track we stopped off at McCall Motorsports to scale out Tracy's '01 Biesse Viper. What should have been fairly routine and done in about an hour quickly digressed into a fairly substantial repair. As we set the #99 kart on the scales the RF wheel cambered in about 10 degrees. Upon inspection, we found the upper kingpin bearing falling apart. I don't think Butch believed me when I said it had been all right last week when I had done the alignment but that wasn't the main focus - the main focus was getting what was left of the bearing out of the spindle unit. And that proved to be the biggest challenge and all I can say is that I was glad we discovered it there by all of Butch's fancy tools. Otherwise I would not have gotten it out without some embarrassing behavior and language.
Tracy's challenge is to feel what the kart is doing while she learns how to control it.
Once the new (again my obsession with having spares paid off) bearing was in place and the alignment was quickly checked (dead on from my alignment last week - see Butch, if that bearing was bad then... oh, never mind) we had it back on the scales and we were pretty close to where we wanted to be but a little light overall. We determined where to place the additional weight and pulled the kart off. While the scales were set up we quickly scaled Dana's out as well and learned a few things there too, changes that can be made later.
Dana's becoming quite an effective test driver.
We finally got to the track about 2 hours later than we had hoped. While I readied the karts Dana and Tracy walked the track as much as they could with practice going on. They reported that Steve had back-filled a lot of the big drop-offs but that there were still some areas they'd have to use caution in. Once out there they found that the track is offering up more grip than we thought it would at this stage so the adjustments we we making were to take grip out of the karts. Dana has gotten very good at knowing what she wants me to change when she comes in from a session but Tracy is still getting a feel for what the kart is doing under her. One advantage we have is the ability to send Dana out right behind Tracy and have her watch what Tracy's kart is doing and offer either confirmation or a different perspective as Tracy and I discuss what she felt.
Overall we made a lot of progress and were happy with the improvements we were seeing. With the new surface we can't compare our times to last year's to know how competitive we are but we did put a clock on several of Tracy's competitors and we were encouraged by what that revealed. A few more practice days with Tracy and we should be ready for the new season.

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