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Todd
Of course we all know that we can’t run pump gas because of the tech issues. Just don’t tell me you’re giving Rotax an advantage when you’re not. All you’re doing by allowing MS93 is not penalizing the Rotax. Period.
Who cares what Stars is doing? I dont. Besides, track design is not much of a factor when all karts are running the same or basically the same engine package. The differences between a TM ICC or a Pavesi ICC are miniscule and track design will have little to no impact on who wins or loses. For whick class Stars is running will track design make any difference? If we were running ICC or stock moto, I could care less what the track is.
However, with Tag, its entirely a different story. Just as we have seen people make engine purchasing decisions based on the track and weight where they will be running, so too it matters when where we decide to race. Why should anyone invest $2,000 to $3,000 to attend a race where they have zero chance to compete? Why do you think we didn’t go to New Castle? Already been there and we knew we couldn’t compete with the other engine packages at that track. Is it any surprise that there was only 1 Rotax there?
Rotax is by far the largest number of Tag engines with Leopard a close second. As we saw last year, track design has a huge impact on which engine package is quick. So why wouldn’t you want to get the word out as quickly as possible so that people could make inteligent decisions on where to race and where not to race?
You say trust me, a pro did it. I say fine, show me the money. But don’t ask me to trust you.
As typical with you, you hear but you don’t listen.
@Marc Elliott wrote:
Do not get too angry Doug, I happen to know who is designing it, and it is being designed by quite capable hands, so need to worry.
Marc
I have been told it will different on many occasions, but I have also been lied to many times by these guys. They have exactly zero credibility with me. In my opinion, you can’t believe a word out of their mouths until you see it posted on the web site.
Until they post the track layout, my adivce stands. Last years track was not a track to take a Rotax to and I won’t waste one penny on them until they come clean.
The other thing I want to see is a schedule. How on earth are they going to get 10 classes through and give you any kind of track time? Why are they giving so much track time to SP when they are paying the same entry fee as the rest of the racers. Why are the support class being forced to purchase 2 sets of tires at a price that’s a least $20 to $30 higher than just about what any racer can buy them for.
I’ve been told that we will be doing so much racing that we will need two sets of tires. That’s a bunch of bull. I have been going to SuperNats long before most current racers started racing. The support classes can easily get by with one set. K2, K3 and Tag do NOT need two sets of tires to get through this event. If the 125 guys need two sets, they really should learn how to setup their kart and how to preserve tires.
I was going to the SuperNats when there were 50-60 guys in almost every class. It was grueling just to make the main event. We were very proud to get our national number there and we wore them with pride and honor. I remember one year where every one of the top 10 in our class was there and every one had their national numbers on. You could feel the respect the other racers gave you when you pulled into the grid area. You could see how happy and proud they were when they were able to run with the national numbers. That is all gone.
If you made the main without going through the LCQ, you really did something. I strongly doubt that they’ll need LCQ’s for any class. Most classes won’t have full fields.
The Rotax only has an advantage if the track doesn’t have a slow corner relative to the straights. Since it has a limited power range, engines that have a wider power band will pound the Rotax regardless of weight.
So when will the SuperNats track be posted? The way the track was last year, Rotax’s shouldn’t bother showing up. The only reason the Sonic and Commer didn’t win last year was they kept blowing them up. The best Rotax will be behind how ever many quality boost ported and Leopard engines are there. You couldn’t put enough weight on or take enough weight off the Rotax to make them competitve on that track. Between the cheaten Bilands and the boost port engines, we looked like we were going backwards down the straight. The slow corners were 6,000 rpm and they ran out of gear half way down the straight. So why all the secrecy?
And on the fuel, running MS98 hurts the Rotax. Running MS93 doesn’t help them, nor does it give them an advantage. Basically they run like like crap on the higher octane fuel. It really screws up the jetting. We have to lean them way down just to keep them running. If you really wanted to see one run, we would run 91 pump gas, or even 89. The Rotax is so low compression, the higher stuff octane kills them.
I’m telling my Rotax TaG customers, don’t waste one penny on the SuperNats until they see the track. Only then should they make up their minds about going.
We’ve got a solution for the brakes, it’s called Wilwood! When we were at New Castle earlier this year, we raced both Billy Lewis and Mark Dismore Jr. Billy was using a Sonic at the time and Mark was of course on his Leopard. Running at TaG senior weights before Sonic got raised, it wasn’t even close. Billy was 1.5 seconds quicker than both us and Dismore and it as all in the straights! It was after that race and based on what Mark saw, he changed the weights for all three engines at his track.
http://www.newcastleraceway.com/classes.shtml
We were faster than both through the eastern half of the track but once they got to the straight, the Sonic checked out. The Leopard pulled us a bit, but not much. Greg and Mark had a great race for a while. You guys ran the monza turn going north which we did not, so that would have negated the Sonics a bit.
It does point out the difficulty of making weights that work at all tracks and all track configurations. Add to that the differences in driver and chassis setups. For example, at IMI, some drivers with exactly the same engine package are 1.5 second off other drivers. To account for the difference by motor alone there would have to be 7 to 10 hp differences! It may well be an impossible task to truely balance the packages given such disparities.
IMI is particularly hard on front tires. The turns are gentle and the speeds high. The kart tends to push and that takes the front tires off the kart. There are some things you can do to the kart to help mitigate it.
I have yet to find a tire that doesn’t perform better new than after a few heat cycles. Every tire we have ever run, and we have run B’stones, MG, Maxxis, Yokahama, Dunlop, there always seem to be one or two laps in them in their first heat cycle that’s .3 ot .5 faster than subsquent laps. What this means is that for qualifying, it’s much better to have new tires than old.
Bottom line, I really don’t care how long the tire lasts. It’s a moot point. If you want to qualify up front, you WILL go out on new tires. The MG is a fine tire. I have a whole pile of them that could easily get one or two more races out of them. But there no way we will use them for anything but practice. The simple reason is this, we want to qualify on the front row if not pole. The only way you will be able to do that is with new tires.
It doesn’t matter what tire you pick, hard, soft, medium, at every race, if you want the front row, you will be on new tires. Changing tire brands will have minimal impact on overall tire costs.
In NorCal, they use hard tires which in theory last all year. Yet at every race, the front runners are on new tires. The reason is simple, new tires are faster than old tires.
While many bad mouth the Mojo tires, they actually are pretty good. At the Rotax Grands, most of the teams had figured them out. The racers were allowed only one set of tires for the event. And they put alot of laps on them with so many heat races, qualifying, LCQ’s and such. The tires had plenty of life in them after all that. But, they, like all tires have one or two very fast laps in them before they settle down. Could you get two or three race days in, sure you can. But if you want to run up front, you need new tiress for qualifying.
@Chuck D wrote:
How do you get the chassis to roll more “free”?
That is an entire seminar. Give me a call and I’ll go over the basics.
303-781-7829@kcl wrote:
24.7.3 Driver Fairing- Driver fairing must be of CIK style and material is optional. Maximum width of panel is 9?. No part of the fairing may be higher than the top of the steering wheel.
I know one CIK rule that almost every kart on the CSC grid could be dq’ed for. Do you guys know which one it is?
Personally I think it’s a stupid rule but then again, it’s CIK! 😯
No Rich, we did not race. I was there solo helping customers. I really wish we were racing it and who knows, if they do what they are talking about concerning tires, maybe we will. I must have talked with 50 or 60 different customers and I was in most of the tents on front row (and back row for that matter). Every mini-max in the top 5 qualifying had our axles in them.
The one thing that stuck out was is that it is mostly privatiers. While there were big tents, it was the guys from a particular track or series that went together and got a tent. The factory guys were there, but like me, they were just helping customers. The plane out Sunday night was full of many friends who were there doing just what I did. A plane full of go kart guys, how cool is that. There were conversations going on everywhere!
If a person only has time for one or two big deal events in a year, I would heartly recommend doing the Rotax Grands. I’m going to hang on to a Rotax just in case we decide to do it next year.
I was at the Rotax Grands this two weeks ago. As you guys know, all Rotaxes are sealed. The head of tech was Scott Evens, well know in karting as very, very through tech. He has found many non-compliant karts in his role as tech director for Stars. He goes over chassis as well as motor. He has found racers non-compliant for simple things like radiator height.
During the entire event, many, many engines were torn down as well as many more were checked through less evasive methods like I have long championed short of tear down.
End result, NOT ONE SINGLE engine was found to be out of compliance.
The racing was incredibly close. In the international class qualifying, 43 karts in a field of 67 was within 1 second of pole! In junior, 34 of 49 were within 1 second! There were a total of 3 dq is qualifying and one in the mains, all for weight. While Sunday’s rain in the main events jumbled things a bit, during the dry heat races, the karts were literally one long snake going around the track. It was without a doubt, the best racing I’ve seen in many, many years.
Anyone who claims the Rotax program is suspect doesn’t have a clue or facts to back them up. For Rotax, the seal really is the deal.
What better way to get a new facility than to get rid of the old. As long as PPIR existed, there was little chance of a superspeed way being built. I look for there to be an anouncement within the next year of a new speedway east of Denver. The connections between Centrex building a facility and ISC closing PPIR are not coincidental. It may suck in the short term, but long term I think it looks very good.
Stacey, Now would be a VERY good time to build a road race track over in Junction! You could book in guys with real money, not us two bit karters!
A Norcal Leopard will have a different shape in the head when compared to stock. There will also be different squish measurements. They should be easy to catch if you know what your looking for.
But the gains are not significant for most drivers. It is easy to be fooled in thinking a guy/gal has a hot motor if they come off the corners faster than another driver. A chassis that is rolling free will get the power down much qucker and carry much more momentum than a chassis/driver that is not. The difference can easily be 4 to 5 kart lengths. This will translate into 3 or 4 mph down the straight. I hear it all the time, “Its the motor” when in fact its the chassis/driver.
Unfortunatly because of insurance reasons, they can not let spectators in the pit area without buying the insurance (pit pass). If they did, it would negate the insurance for the rest of us. At Bandimere, there isn’t an effective way to let spectators watch the races without granting them access to the pits. IMI has the same issue, they do not have a seperate spectator area so everyone has to buy a pit pass so that the rest of us can have insurance coverage. At Grand Junction, they do have an area they can seperate from the pits so they do allow spectators in for free. They just can’t visit the caged animals (racers)!
Actually, the SKUSA rules and classes for the SuperNats are a step backwards and will only further hasten their demise. It is unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.
We quite running open moto engines for a reason, they are too expensive. We quite running ICC for a simple reason, they are too expensive. It is for these reasons that both engines have sufferend greatly these past few years. SKUSA in the current class structure has done nothing to halt this trend.
While tires and all the other stuff are significant costs, the addition of the motors and silly prices charged for poorly made karts is driving people out of the sport. Worse, we have driven the costs up so much that you can run cars for the same money.
Case in point, at current prices, a top of the line ICC shifter package retails for at least $8,000 and usually runs $10,000 or more depending on equipment and the amount of blessing you have done to the engine. Yes you can run a “stock” ICC for a long time and they can be dependable. But you will not run at the front of the pack. (However, if the fields keep shrinking you can by default). To make them last, you need to run them fat, short shift them, in general, have fun but don’t race them hard.)
For roughly the same money, I can buy or build a Spec Miata. Without question, I can race them for LESS money. I have talked with too many people who have done both and to a man they tell me the same thing, they spent less money this year racing a Spec Miata than they did last year running either unrestricted moto or ICC. One dad said he was spending less that he did in 80 jr! At the end of the year guess what, I can sell the Spec Miata for what I paid for it (If we don’t wad it up). Try that with a kart! What this tells me is that karting is competiting with traditional forms of motorsports and that my friends is a battle we will lose every time.
Karting has to know its place in the grand scheme of motorsports. We are the bottom rung and we need to be cheap. If SKUSA thinks that by giving the motos a 10# weight break that somehow all these old engines are going to find their way out of the garages and back on to the track, they are sadly mistaken. The orginal owners have either sold them to some unspecting newbi and he for sure won’t be at the SuperNats.
If we want karting to grow, it has to get back to its roots, we have to be the cheapest form of motorsports.
A final note, there is no way to tech a stock ICC from a “built” ICC. They have exactly the same rules and they come from the factory with the ports ground.
SKUSA’s rules on stock motos is equaly bad. I’ve had this talk with both Joe and Todd and they know where I stand. The stock Honda class should be 1999 cylinder and head only. It should be 6 speed tranny only. It should be 1999 ignition only. Opening it up to multiple years only increases the option for testing and only increases costs. Remember my point about cheapest form of motorsports, every time we open the rules, it increases the costs and puts us closer to competiting with traditional motorsports and it hurts our sport.
