  Central Ohio Welding 253 E. Spring St., Col |
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Central Ohio Welding 253 E. Spring St., Col |
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Dana |
31 December - 2005 In Review
PRD Fireball
Following two MSOKC HPV championships and a 2nd in the 2004 Super Can championship, we had intended to run Dana and Tracy in the same classes for 2005. But when our Super Can motor blew up big time in the last race of the 2004 season it was decided to move Dana up to TaG a year earlier than planned and have Tracy take over the HPV.
The TaGUSA rules equalize the various TaG motors with weight penalties. Bolting weight onto racing karts is always a questionable proposition: it has to be placed carefully to maintain the desired weight distribution; it's harder on the crews' backs; and it makes the kart more dangerous to the driver in accidents. Because our drivers are so light, the engine we'd need to choose would have to allow us to run the lightest weight acceptable. The motors that would allow us to run the minimum were the Leopard, Vortex Rok, BM Jaguar and the PRD Fireball.
Of these, the PRD fit our budget the best. In researching PRD, or Pro Racing Design, I found that the company was well established as a kart engine & component manufacturer in Asia - almost a Pacific Ring version of Horstman. It used a Tillotson carb like on the Leopard and the same clutch design as on the Rotax. The engine was being imported by Grand Products for which our friends at J&J Racing were a dealer. When Mike Geissen drove a Fireball to 3rd in the TaG senior class amongst a herd of Soniks at first 2005 Manufacturer's Cup in Daytona, it seemed like we were running out of reasons not to go with the PRD. So with a call to John Giacomelli at J&J, we were officially a TaG entrant.
Dana (L) got by Todd Mees in April for our first race win of the season and possibly the first win for a PRD Fireball on US soil.
Going into the season we planned to run a few Nationals, a Divisional series and a handful of MSOKC races at Circleville Raceway Park. It was an ambitious plan that was almost immediately compromised by a total lack of pre-season testing. Between all of our work schedules and uncooperative weather patterns the karts never turned a wheel until a week before the first MSOKC race. But when the green flag flew both ladies got off to a great start with Tracy racking up a second in her new class and Dana pulling off a heat race win in TaG. In fact, the April 10 win may have been the first victory with the Fireball engine on American soil.
That good start was immediately followed by our first WKA National, the Manufacturer's Cup at BeaveRun Motorsport Complex. It was quite an experience and frankly, we weren't ready for that level of competition. It didn't help that it rained and snowed the entire weekend putting Tracy and Dana in the position of getting a handle on their new motors in wet conditions. The whole weekend was a disaster and the full story was in our April update.
Who was the Einstein that thought Pennsylvania would be a good place for an April National?.
Our plans also called for us to follow the Midwest Sprint Series, a WKA divisional series that would give us more competition and a chance to get acquainted with more tracks. But when my mom had a spell of illness in the spring we missed two of the MSS's closest races and decided to forego the rest of the series. The fall-back plan was to focus once again on the MSOKC championship.
One of the things that hurt us at the national race was that we were running the Fireball motor pretty much dead stock and had done virtually no development work on it. This began to hurt us even at the club level as it was August before Dana was able to claim another win in TaG Senior. Frankly, I underestimated the development that a new motor would need and underestimated the time I/we would have to do it. It wasn't until towards the end of the season we got Bill Willis of POWERsports involved with our engine development and things turned around. Tracy, on the other hand, seemed to always be in the hunt in Spec 100 picking up a couple wins before mid-season. It is just that the Spec 100 class was so tight with good karts and good drivers that any sort of mistake or bad luck was hard to overcome, difficult to improve positions.
Spec 100 competition was so tight that the slightest mistake resulted in lost positions
It was also around mid-season that we had a spell of self-induced hard luck with a rash of wheels separating themselves from our karts. The resulting in DNFs were very damaging to our championship hopes. We're not really sure what caused that those problems other than being short of prep time and being overwhelmed in getting two karts on the track. Whatever the reason, those problems should have been preventable and we did implement procedures within the team to keep them from happening again. On top of that, in Tracy's case at least, it seemed like we had more than our fair share of hard luck getting involved in other driver's misfortunes.
By the end of the MSOKC season, our team added 9 more victories to our tally, bringing the total for our team with the ladies doing the driving to 45. Dana was responsible for 5 of those and Tracy the other 4. But we also recorded our highest number of DNFs and DNSs since we began racing karts - not a statistic we're proud of or wish to repeat. All things considered, we were fortunate to finish 2nd in TaG Senior and 5th in Spec 100 MSOKC Championships.
2005 Conlin SpeedSports endurance driving team
If we were disappointed with our final standings in the club championship and our first National experience, we made up for it with a new, exciting challenge. About mid-season, after we had abandoned ideas of following Midwest Sprint Series, we committed ourselves to entering the 200 Mile endurance race that New Castle Motorsports Park had announced. This was a very rewarding project if not for our final result but for chance to gain new friends, work as a team in new ways and promote women in racing.
The endurance race turned out to be our focus for the second half of the season and to a certain point may have distracted us a bit from the MSOKC championship. We tried to go about preparation for the 200 miles in a systematically way, testing various systems of the kart to know what limitations we were facing. We also assembled a fantastic team of crew members and lady drivers all of whom I was very proud to have working with us. After qualifying 15th we ran as high as 11th before a cracked head retired us less than 25 miles from the end and placed us 20th out of a 42 kart field. The full report is available here.
In between all that racing and testing we also managed to help a few charities. Back in February we participated in the Ohio Motorsports Expo at the Ohio State Fairgrounds benefiting the Ohio Chapter of the Make A Wish Foundation. We once again headed to Dayton in the fall to support the Red Dog Racers Charity Auction to benefit Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals joining a long list of Midwest drivers for an autograph session, meet & greet and radio interview. Last but not least, leading up to the TaG 200 race we were able to collect pledges for Habitat For Humanity's hurricane relief fund based on the number of laps we completed in the endurance race. Many, many thanks to everyone that pledges and made that endeavor a success.
We also had some good press in 2005. Back in January National Kart News published an article featuring our team on karting as a family. They followed that up in April with the story about Dana's participation in the Lyn St. James Foundation Driver Development Program. In the September NKN Dana's tests of Vega tires was a sidebar story to a feature article about Vega. Then, the Wednesday before the 200 mile race our hometown paper, Hilliard Northwest News, announced what we attempting in the endurance race.
It was a good year overall. It is always nice to be able to boast a championship for year-long efforts but to do that you have to be absolutely on the top of your game. And this year we weren't for a variety of reason. But, we still learned a lot about TaG, the PRD, how to keep the wheels on the kart, how to go 200 miles in a kart... all things we can use in 2006 to get back on on our game.
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