“Any day spent at the race track is better than a day at work”. I don’t believe this. There’s not much worse than a bad day at a race track. There are good days at the races and there are bad days. Friday was a good day at the races.

I’ve previously chronicled my early struggles during this year’s karting season, almost all were the result of lack of preparation on my part. My new kart took a bit to get properly adjusted, I had an incident that launched my kart in the air and took a lot of work to get straightened.

Fortunately, those issues didn’t last too long.

Off Camber Karters is what we call our karting group, made up of drivers 18-60+ years old. We race a single class: Rotax DD2 and have over 35 registered members, of which 24-28 will come out on a regular basis making OCK the largest DD2 group in the world. Another unique element is that we compete on Wednesday afternoons, similar in nature to Men’s Night at many golf courses.  At least 5 of our drivers have competed at the Rotax Grand Finals, some multiple times.

Edmonton & District Kart Racing Association (EDKRA) is the operator of Rotax Mojo Raceway located about 45 minutes outside of Edmonton in the village of Warburg.

This weekend EDKRA hosted it’s flagship event-the Summer Challenge. It’s a fun event that brings our entire club together over 3 days, provides great prizes (including cash) and has evening entertainment with full podium celebrations, band and even fireworks.  During most of the season there are no prizes, we just race for points (and fun).

OCK’s Summer Challenge race schedule was contested entirely on Friday. I went into the Summer Challenge event having won the last 2 races and feeling pretty good about how I was running.  I came up with a run plan for how to qualify, make a run for Super Pole (if I made it) and then how to deal with the race.

I had originally intended to be at the track in the early afternoon to deliver my camper and to get it setup before things got too hectic. It was a good plan but it was not to be. Things are quite busy at work which kept me in the office much later than I’d planned. Arriving to the track after 4PM meant that one of the big changes that I wanted to make to my kart would have to wait for another time. I needed to be ready to qualify at 5:15.

See my previous post for the story on why my camper wasn’t already at the track: https://crier.co/is-the-glass-half-empty-or-half-full/

My qualifying plan was to do a ‘shakedown’ session, analyze the kart’s performance, make any changes and test until I was happy with the kart. Shakedown is where we run the kart on old (slower) tires to make sure that everything is functioning properly. If there are any mechanical issues we’d have time to fix them and we can get a decent idea of the balance of the kart before we make our actual qualifying runs.

Summer Challenge offers cash and prizes meaning that everyone was going to put their best foot forward-new tires for everyone. Rules state that you have to race on the tires that you will qualify on. We actually have to scan the bar codes of the tires you declare as your race tires to make sure that no one pulls any shenanigans.

My shakedown went ok, wasn’t quite as quick as I wanted but I knew that I’d be able to go quicker once I put my sticker (new) tires on.

Part of my run plan was that once my shakedown was complete I wanted to switch to stickers but wait to go out towards the end of qualifying to let as much rubber get laid down on the track as possible (more grip=faster speeds). A few drivers had issues in qualifying which made me nervous that the session could be delayed or halted and I chose to make my qualifying run once the track was clear.

The trick with my qualifying was to run one hot lap, making sure that I save as much of my brand new tires as possible. We run Mojo D5 tires which are very good and quite durable. They are at their very best in the first few laps.

I ran a 48.4 second lap which was about .4 faster than I had gone so far this year and put me P1 by just over .1 which should be more than enough to be in the top 3 for the Super Pole.  You don’t ever want to take anything for granted in racing, someone can always throw up a banger lap and if you’re not ready you can end up on the sidelines. I kept my kart in the hot pit and kept my gear on….just in case. I also spent a lot of time watching the lap times of those I was racing against. It is a fairly anxious time; I will spend a lot of time pacing around, looking over my kart and chatting with fellow competitors-we’re all very friendly with each other even though we compete.

After qualifying I was P1 which entered me to run for Super Pole, it also let me go out last which was my preference.

We didn’t make any changes to my kart, just went out and threw up a 48.22 on my first lap which was more than enough to claim the Super Pole award which also came with a $500.00 prize and a very unique trophy!

Now, onto the race. We ran 3 heats consisting of 10 laps in Heat 1, 10 laps in Heat 2 and a 12 lap Final. For the purpose of this blog I should try to spice up the heats but simply put I drove away from my competition finishing about a straightaway ahead of P2.  Winning the race came with a $750.00 prize and another trophy!

I certainly did the driving and executed when I had to but there were a lot of people that helped along the way.

Our Summer Challenge title sponsor: 3D Line Locating

Super Pole sponsor: Apollo Motorsports

CRG in Italy makes the world’s finest karts and is a company that I am extremely proud to represent in Western Canada. We made up 2 of the top 3 places and could have had all 3 if one of our karts didn’t suffer a shift cable failure. We were also positioned to win the 397 class but Matthew Taskinen’s kart had a small mechanical issue relegating him to 2nd.

Tag Motorsport put together a kick-ass racing engine which is running great, they have also helped with many setups and racing instruction. Alex, Remo, Jonah & JP have all been excellent.

Alfano lap timers are the world’s most user friendly lap timers which also gave me live delta to let me know that I was on a heater lap.

Greyhound racing seats have given me a really awesome combination of flex, feel and durability this year.

Zamp helmets is new to our group and we’ve had a great deal of success with their products already.

Overdrive Motorsports was instrumental in getting my kart straightened out and back to race condition. Thanks to Joey, Jesse and Tennille.

Jason Gregor-for your friendship and support over the past 5 years of the CanTorque Race Report, really looking forward to resurrecting the segment as soon as possible.

Crier Media Group and Dean Blundell-Thank you for providing me a platform to share my love of motorsports and for very patiently mentoring me along the way.

Personal thanks to my son Parker who runs the shop and picks up the slack when I take time away from the business to go racing.

Tim Gnida is an excellent mechanic and kept things rolling.

Mandy, you are the ying to my yang and there’s no one else that I’d rather have with me during my good and bad days.