WKA Briggs & Stratton / APS World Championships Municipal Stadium, Daytona Beach, FL December 26 - 30, 2002     Photos load one after the other. Depending on your modem speed, there maybe a short delay between images.

Race Report

Back home at Daytona! Boy, did we have a great weekend for racing. Beautiful weather and not a drop of rain. Only thing was, that is not what we expected at all.

Daytona is all about tire prep. Everybody has their special "guaranteed to get you in the race" formula and we all come with our tires soaked, wrapped and cooked in it. My crew chief was out in the garage for a week mixing up all kinds of nasty smelling stuff so we had our magic tires when we got to the track just like everybody else.

This year I had to move up to Sportsman II and they don't race on the first day. So, we spend the first day snooping around everybody else's pits to see what they were doing. Usually the track doesn't get any bite in it at all the first day but, without a cloud in the sky, the sun shone brightly all day and the track actually got pretty good. No one anticipated this so many racers were just locked down on the track with these sticky tires and couldn't get up any speed.

There is just a mind set at this track. We all expect the worst and with classes that have over 200 racers going for 30 starting spots, you get a little intimidated to say the least. So, when we went out on Saturday morning to practice for our first race, like everybody else, we had our gum ball tires on. We even worked up this goofy set up that we had never run before thinking that we had it all figured out. That worked pretty good in the first practice but in the second practice the kart was already tightening up and wouldn't turn in the corners like it should.

When it came time for qualifying the track had baked in the sun another full afternoon and was about a second faster than last year. Instead of these gum balls, what we really needed was a set of old, hard tires, but they changed the left side tire specs this year so all anybody had was brand new ones. We tried cutting the rubber off a couple tires and ruined them. Then we bought new tires, cut most of the rubber off of them, but they were still too soft. I did the best I could to free the kart up but I could only go fast enough to qualify 52nd out of 77 entries.

In second round we put on a set of brand new tires with no prep in them and went out in the first group and qualified 6th fasted but there where 4 more groups that came after mine and slowly I dropped from 6th to 7th, to 8th, to 9th, to 10th and then in the last group one racer squeaked out a slightly faster lap and I got knocked off the bubble qualifying 31st and out of the race. I missed the race by .06 of a second!

On Sunday we got a little better and so did the track yet some of the racer still thought they needed these gum ball tires. That played to our advantage because it slowed some pretty fast racers down. We still weren't all that fast but we managed to qualify 19th in the first round and got into the race.

By the time the race started the sun had set and the dew began to drop. That made the track greasy and so the gum ball tires were really important. I started the race and ran as hard as I could but I just couldn't get off the corners as well as I needed to. About all I could do was hold my line and try to keep the faster karts behind me. I passed a few karts and got passed by a few others ending up 17th. When we loaded up my kart, my rear bumper was bent in 3 inches!

On Monday I got to race my new Junior Sportsman Champ Kart for the first time. The track was even better than the day before and we took everything we had learned and put it on the champ. I felt really good about the kart in practice because, for the first time all weekend, my kart was a little loose. When first round qualifying was over I had locked in a spot in the race with a 14th fastest qualifying time.

My crew chief had been telling me how I had to be careful with the champ because the front wheels don't have a body around them to protect them. I have seen sprint cars tumble end over end down the back stretch after touching tires with another car so I was a little nervous to say the least. After we got through the pump around and I got all belted in I was sitting there thinking about the race and all of a sudden I thought, "I'm starting on the outside! How do I get down in line without flipping the kart?" I started yelling to my crew chief, "I don't know how to get in!". He said, "What do you mean? You are already in!" I said, "Not in the kart! In line in the corners! I'm starting on the outside!" He tried a couple of lines of encouragement but I didn't feel any better until finally he said, "Look, if these kids can do it, you can do it." I said, "Yea!"

When the race started they all spun so we went single file anyway. That probably hurt me a little but I felt much better and raced my way up to 8th by the end of the race. The 5th place kart was light so I wound up with a 7th my first time out. Boy, I hope that's not beginner's luck. This champ kart is really fun!