Handling question

[Brad Linkus]

The first question is how old are your tires and what are they?

[Kirk Deason]

Brad, admittedly, I am running older tires; MG Yellows with about 100 laps on them. (maybe more).

Point taken, ref new tires. For sake of my budget reality, lets assume i will continue to run shagged tires and I know that if I tune using old tires, new tires will turn my careful setup on its head. This is my FIRST chassis change, ever.

[cgordon]

Hi Kirk,

My first kart was a 2002 Birel, which I think is pretty similar to your EK chassis. I had a similar problem – when I tried to drive hard through slow corners it got sideways and lost momentum.

Here’s what I did – put maximum caster in the front (get caster pills from Birel, they won’t be legal for EK races but are ok for TaG), soft axle, 55″ rear width, max width on the front, remove the seat struts. The net effect was that the kart picked up grip overall and softened the rear a bit relative to the front. This made the kart quicker and much more predictable and easy to drive. It wasn’t on so much of a knife-edge in slow corners any more.

Charles

[Kirk Deason]

Thanks Charles! That’s the kind of tip I was looking for! Just something to get me started in the right direction. Much appreciated.

Kirk

[Anonymous]

Kirk,

I have an Italkart and I had similar handling till I made some adjustments. The kart is more stable and predicatble since I widened the rear to 54 1/2 and then worked with the front width till I got rid of the push it created. Not sure if you have a side tortion bar, but I removed mine and that seemed to free up the kart as well.

Others that have helped with rear grip:
shorten width in rear – small change like 1/8th inch on each side
raise tire pressure, say 1/2 to one pound. This added grip won’t last long with many laps on a hot track!

I would say, make small changes and only one at a time, till you get familiar with the results.

I’ve only been doing this a couple months, but I’ve asked a lot of questions and everyone has been very helpful.

See you out at the track.

Tony

[Anonymous]

Kirk,

you may want to get an Arrow Adjustment Manual-the best i have seen for correcting problems.

See me when I am racing and i will show you.

[Author]

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