FDDS Race #5

Cross Roads Motorplex, Jasper, FL
August 21st, 2004

Race Report

Back at Jasper again and nothings changed! When we got to the track on Friday the track was a mud pit. They didn't even have practice which I'm sure would have been a waste of time anyway.

On Saturday morning things started to look pretty good despite the weather prediction of 60% chance of rain. We didn't go out for the first round of practice but by the time second round started the track was beginning to come in and we thought it would be a good idea to just make sure that the karts were right and that I remembered how to drive.

Each round of practice is sort of like 2 rounds really because we go out twice in each kart, once for lite and once for heavy. I already weigh more than the heavy class so they are all the same to me. Each time we went out the kart felt a little better and then in the last practice in the champ the kart really started to feel good. The problem was that the RPM that the motors were getting didn't make any sense. My crew chief sets the karts up for qualifying before we even leave the house so the RPM should be a little low in practice. We can usually tell where the gear should be on the one kart if we know what the gear should be on the other. They were both set up the same but we had one that was a little low and one that was really high!

To add to the mistery, 2 weeks ago at the nationals we tried something in qualifying that we though helped us a little. Before that we had always tried to run as big a front driver as we could and as a result we usually ran a pretty big rear gear too. We dropped the front gear a tooth and then the back gear about 3 teeth to get the same gear ratio. The idea was to get a little bit more acceleration. When we got home we took the karts apart to clean them and then, before we put them back together, we decided to drop the gear for Jasper as well.

Here where it started to get a little confusing. With our new motors we've had to drop the gear on the rear about 2 teeth from what we usually run. So, before we put the clutches on the motors, we stopped and re-figured the gear for Jasper again and realized that we probably didn't need to drop the front gear so we left it alone. The problem was that we didn't write anything down. Sounds like a crew chief error doesn't it? That's what I said. Well, by the time we got to the track we thought that we had dropped the front gear a tooth when we hadn't so when we figured where the rear gear was supposed to be we were way off.

During the first qualifying session I was pretty slow and qualified 8th in the sprint kart and 5th in the champ. When we came in and looked at the tach I was almost 400 RPM too low on the sprint kart and over 500 RPM too high on the champ. You should have seen my crew chief then! Absolutely nothing was making sense at that point but he changed the gear on the back of the flat kart and then decided to change the driver on the champ. That's when things started to make a little bit more sense. Well, sort of... With the clutch in hand we found out that the gear was a tooth higher than we thought it was. Next, we marked a tooth on the flat kart's driver and then counted the teeth on it as we turned the wheel and sure enough we were a tooth higher there as well. That explained why were were low on the sprint but why were we 500 RPM too high on the champ? We should have been 400 too low there as well.

By this time my crew chief was turning in circles but he finally settled down and decided to check one more thing. We have a playback feature on our tach that lets us replay each lap in real time and in 10th of a second intervals. He sat down and scrolled through each lap and found that there was a spike in the RPMs but that overall we were 400 RPM too low on the champ just like the sprint kart was. Turned out that the tach lead was bad. After replacing the lead, putting the clutch back on as it was, and adding 3 teeth to the rear gear on both karts, I went out and qualified a lot better. I picked up over 2 tenths of a second and sat 4th in the sprint and outside pole in the champ.

Then the rain came and just about washed us over into Georgia so they had to call the races off and let us stand on our qualifying times. But, we'll be heading back to Jasper in 2 weeks and then again 2 weeks after that so we should have this gear thing figured out eventually!