Sam Boyd Stadium, Las Vegas, November 10-13, 2005
Superkarts USA Supernationals
How Do We Stack Up?  Can We Hang With the Big Boys? (Girls?)

The mini-F1 circus heads to Vegas for some crazy close wheel-to-wheel racing -
Image by Steve Bullard at www.imagejunky.com
(click here for larger pic)

So after that last relatively successful race at Moran (at least for me), Wayne and I are feeling cocky.  We think we should swagger into the SKUSA (SuperKarts USA) SuperNationals at Vegas and see how we do.  Especially since we see that at the Nation's Cup race in Colorado, Matt Kimble took pole in the stock Honda class, Greg Smith took 2nd, and the third place guy was 6/10ths behind Matt.  Greg ended up winning the class, and Matt was right behind him in 2nd place.  Right now, we calculate we are 7/10ths behind Matt at Moran, which makes us go hummm.......we have a shot at third place on the podium.  At least in our own demented minds, even though we've each only raced in one kart race the past six months......

Carter ready to roll in the shifter kart

Miscellaneous Car Stuff
We have some minor car woes.  We keep saying we are going to make it to a SpeedVentures event and bring out the NSX, S2000, and Evo.  The NSX is packed in the trailer, and has been ready to go for two months.  Wayne's Evo has been on the lift at the shop for two months.  Wayne and Jason are working on putting in some new crank bearings to try to get rid of the minor rattling sound in his motor.  The F355 is overheating, so either the fan motor died, or the temperature switch that fires up the fan is bad.   I need to get off my ass and get this fixed, along with putting some type of airbag disable switch for the passenger seat, so I can buzz around Kayla in the car.

Last minute check to make sure kart is ready to go on the track - image by Steve Bullard
Image by Steve Bullard at www.imagejunky.com

Messley drops a transmission on his foot, crushing a couple of toes.  One of his shoes is now two sizes bigger, and it might stay like that permanently.  Bummer.  He did a lot of work on Peter Brock's personal Superformance Brock Coupe.  He pretty much took apart the entire suspension, re-tweaked it, meticulously put it back together with the original parts, and got it prepped for a Road and Track testing session.  The testing went extremely well.  You will probably see the results in the March issue of R&T.  Or it might be in a special edition "performance car mag" put out by R&T earlier than that.   Think the new Z06 and Viper are badass cars?  The Messley touch helped the Brock Coupe kick the Z06/Viper's asses in skid pad AND 700 foot slalom tests.  The Brock Coupe also  spanked the Z06 and Viper in the 0-60 mph, quarter mile, etc.  Messley has worked on three other Brock Coupes since working on Peter's car, as everyone wants to get their suspension setup like the Peter's personal coupe.

Messley tweaked the stock suspension on the Brock Coupe.  It now spanks the new Z06 & Viper
(Picture from Richard Graham)

Brett called me up in early November, as one of his friends with a Skyline needed some Hoosiers for a Time Attack event at Pahrump.  This was right after the SEMA show.  Kim, the Skyline owner, was able to get Tarzan (Japanese hot shoe driver) to drive his car, but they had no tires, and no way of getting tires on 24 hour notice on a weekend.  He called me up and wanted to know if I had any Hoosier tires in stock so they could throw down some fast lap times.   (slicks not allowed) I told him I had some slightly used Hoosier 275/35/18 from about a year or so ago that were the rears on the NSX, and another pair of used rears from about six months before that.  They wanted to put four of them on the Skyline, figuring that they would be better than new unshaved RA1s.  They get a person to come to my house and pick up the four used tires, drive them to Vegas, and get them mounted.  Tarzan wins the Overall Fastest Car at event with the Skyline, and the tires from the Flamemobile!  Kim's car is street legal, and he even beat the "race cars" that were there.  Ha ha!

Kim/Tarzan/XS Engineering become overall winners at the Time Attack at Pahrump

Wayne went out and bought another vehicle.  He went shopping for a Toyota Tundra, as he felt that baby Carter's head was moving like a bobble doll in the Evo back seat.  He went to a Elmore Toyota, who was advertising a $249 a month lease, $1500 down.  Apparently they want to blow out the V8 trucks due to concerns about the high price of gasoline.

$8 a day to lease this truck? Bargain of the century?

After doing the test drive and sitting in the sales office for two hours, Wayne is about to finish signing the deal and drive off with the truck.  The finance guy at the dealer then says, "I'm sorry, but your credit isn't good enough to qualify for the lease deal, we are going to have to charge you another $50 bucks a month, so the deal is $299 a month for you".  Wayne is ready to kill the guy, since he wasted two hours finalizing the deal.  "Hey, look at my credit report, you'll see that I have bought and paid off two NSXs, two Ferraris, four Porsches.  I own a house and two buildings, and I don't have any late payments.  And you think I'm gonna default on a $249 truck payment?" 

Matt Kimball.  15 years old, 215 lbs football player. He's kicking our ass on the track

The finance guy says, "Sorry, there is nothing I can do".   Wayne angrily walks out of the sales office, leaving the finance guy there with his mouth hanging open, not believing that Wayne is going to walk away from the deal because of a $50 a month increased payment.  A day later, Wayne visits the Toyota of Huntington Beach dealership, and says he wants the $249 lease deal with no strings attached, and the sales guy says, "Sure no problem".  And he gets the truck for $249 a month.  Of course the previous dealership (Elmore Toyota) didn't give him his license back (probably yet another shady sales tactic, kinda like a reverse "leave behind" from George on the Seinfeld TV show), so Wayne had to go back to the dealership, ask for his license, and then they asked if he was still interested in the $299 a month truck.  Wayne said, "No,  I bought a Tundra for $249 a month down the street.  I just came back here to pickup my license so I can finalize the purchase at the other dealer."  Memo to vendors:  Don't rip off the Pulp Racing guys or their army of fans, because we will expose your shyster ways right here for thousands of people to view every day.

Greg Smith. 59 years old.  Kicking our ass on the track.  We need a half second.....

Meanwhile, Wayne's nephew Dana had the itch for a new car.  He's been driving around a beater Honda Civic with an automatic transmission.  Since he's making all this cash as a sales guy for the Phoneguys, he's thinking he needs some new wheels.  He tells his dad that he is thinking about buying a new Subaru WRX STI, and his dad is telling him this is not a good idea.  I tell him if he is 19 years old, he shouldn't spend more than 19k on a car.  Hey, do 19 year olds ever listen to advice when it comes to cars?  Especially when they have an income stream of $5000 a month?  He goes out and purchases a brand new white WRX STI, paying $679 a month.   He's driving around in style now!  Wayne and I are a bad influence on young people...

Dana goes into debt, buys a brand new Subaru WRX STI

Every time I see Dana at the shop, I ask him, "Did you crash it yet?".  Hopefully that will make sure he doesn't do what most 19 year olds do with car a with 300 HP and will do 0-60 in five seconds.  Wayne's already telling him to put an exhaust on it and turn up the boost...
 

Fernando's GP kart.  He switched from SRA TM to Stock Honda.  He's kicking our ass

Late September, 2005
Wayne had to let his ribs rest a couple of weeks due to his ill-fitting Ribtect seat from the last race. (I uh..mean the practice before the race, as his ribs were hurting to much to enter the race!).  My ribs were hurting a little bit from the crash in the main race with Jeff (either that, or someone hit me after Jeff veered in front of me and I hit Jeff), so a couple of weeks off were needed.

October 16, 2005
Pro Kart Challenge has their awards banquet at the Marconi Auto Museum.  Marconi had a nice pair of red Ferrari F50s sitting in their museum, along with about sixty other cars.  PKC hosted one of the most amazing awards banquet I have ever seen, and I've seen some good ones in both racing and business events.  The top 3 winners in each class got big ass engraved plaques with pictures of them racing on it and cool jackets with their names embossed on them.  I mean, we are talking 3 foot wide plaques with pictures.  They had a drawing for prizes, and it was crazy.  Wayne won the least expensive prize, which was a Sirius Radio with 3 months of activation service.  Other prizes given out were stuff like a TaG Leopard engine, a generator, three Mychron timing units, THREE 125cc kart chassis (two Paul Tracy and one GP Racing), engine rebuild certificates, etc.  The grand prize was a plane ticket to Brazil+hotel+3 day Castroneves Racing Experience school on the Formula One track!  Jim Baltius (ex-KRC racer) won the grand prize, but since he also helps organize the PKC events, he politely declined the grand prize, and they pulled another name out of the hat so a fellow driver could go to Brazil!  Tom Kutscher said at the beginning of the season he wanted to see at the end of the year an awards banquet with hundreds of people(drivers, spouses, kids, etc) and he totally delivered on that.  They must have raffled off close to $30,000 in prizes! You can bet it got everyone fired up for next year's Pro Kart Challenge.  Dust off your old shifter kart, or go out and buy a new one and join us next year.   

Jeff Littrell said he's selling his Sports 2000 race car, and is going to concentrate solely on the Pro Kart Challenge series next year.  He thinks he's gonna come in and swoop onto the podium.  He's gonna have to get by us first...

The Pulp  Team for the weekend, with Jason, Amy, and Carter assisting

October 24, 2005
We are trying to stay with our once a week practice schedule.  We go to Moran with Jeff.  For some reason, our karts aren't handling as well as they did before.   Hummm.  On this day, Jeff is running almost a second a lap faster (1:05.2) than Wayne and myself.  Rocky Moran thinks we need to install additional seat brackets, so we don't get any wanted flex in the rear of the chassis.  Wayne and I decide that it is because Jeff hasn't been running his kart as much as us, and maybe our karts are getting more flex than when we first got them.  Paul and Heidi Taylor come out to the track, along with Jason Trumpio and Doug Ota.  Paul, Heidi, and Jason are running our spare karts.  Ota is about to buy one of our old karts.  It is kinda ridiculous at the shop now in terms of storage, as we have Jeff's new kart, Jeff's old kart, my new kart, Wayne's new kart, and Wayne and I have three old karts with Vortex ICC motors, and our old spare kart with a Kawasaki motor.  That means we have EIGHT karts at the shop right now. 

Paul and Heidi are autocrossers from San Diego that run dual NSXs.  I think we have them hooked on shifter karts.  Jason is blasting around at a pretty good pace for his first time.

Jason, Rhod from 2WildKarting, and Wayne

October 29, 2005
We get the seat brackets from 2Wild, and start prepping the karts for tomorrow's practice day.  Wayne's seat is also too far over to the right in his kart, so his elbow hits the motor and restricts his steering wheel movement.  We take the seat off, carefully re-bend the frame of the kart with a long pipe so the seat will move over 3/4 inch, and re-check the corner balance.  We attribute the frame being slightly off center due to Italian Quality Assurance procedures. We also drop my seat an inch in the rear.  It takes us about four hours to do all of this late Saturday night.

Nice looking trailer for a karting event

October 30th, 2005
We veer off our normal Monday practice schedule, and head off to the track on Sunday.  Monday is Halloween, and we don't want to be in deep water with the wives if we make it back too late to take the kids out for Trick or Treating.  If you go to Moran on Mondays, there are about 6-7 karts at the track.  If you go to Moran on a Sunday, there are about 50 karts there practicing.  It's like a damn race day.  There are about 20 trailers parked in front of us, waiting for the gate to open at the track.  They have to break up into three 20 minute run sessions, Slow, Fast, and kids group. 

A shot of about 50% of the circuit in the Sam Boyd Stadium parking lot

Early in the afternoon, I finally make it into the 1:04's with a 1:04.96.  Ha!  I beat Jeff and Wayne to be the first of us to make it below the 1:05 mark.  About an hour later, Wayne breaks into the 1:04's with an identical 1:04.96.  The track gets slower after that, and we don't get any faster, so we are tied for fastest lap at Moran.  It took us 1.5 years + two new karts with two new Honda motors + 1500 laps, but we break the sub 1:05 barrier.  Now we can work on breaking the sub 1:04 barrier..hopefully it won't take us as long and cost as much as it did to get below 1:05. 

Wayne happy about his 1:04.96

November 2, 2005
The fumes from the Go-Fast Crackpipe overcome Paul and Heidi.  They buy a used 2005 Tony Krypton Chassis, and are planning to buy a stock Honda motor.  They have two NSXs....how long until they get two shifter karts?  I'd give it three months.....

Tony Kart had a huge tent

November 6, 2005
I wake up at 4:30 in the morning for my twice-a-year golf game.  Hopefully I'll shoot below 110.  Some idiot breaks into the truck that I parked on the side street, and rips off my Valentine One radar detector and the satellite radio.  Assholes.  My alarm siren hasn't been working, and I meant to get it fixed in the next couple of days before I go to Vegas.  I birdie the toughest hole at Mount Woodson, a 432 yard par 4.  Tiger Woods, look out, I'm coming after ya.  Damn, this game is easy compared to racing.  Unfortunately, on the other 17 holes, I don't shoot below 110....

Wayne working on the karts in the 2WildKarting tent

November 7, 2005
After spending two hours screwing around trying to find the siren, pulling it out of the truck, and testing it, it seems to work fine.  Hummm...must be the alarm brain unit.  I take the truck to Beach Auto Sound, and ask them to fix the damn alarm.  I tell them the siren seems to work fine, but it doesn't sound off when a door is opened or when someone bangs on the window.  He immediately responds, "You have the alarm in 'valet mode', so just hit the two bottom buttons on the remote at same time to re-enable it."   DOH! 

The A and B grids in the pit area

Our softball team had a great fall season.  All the games were pretty close.  With two games left, we were 4-2-2, and tied with another team that was also 4-2-2.  So we had two ties, we lost one game by one run, and won two games by one run.  We ended up winning game #9 by a couple of runs, and go into the final game of the season in first place by half a game.

The last game of the season is the night before the start of the Supernationals.  Wayne and I decide we can't ditch the team, since we have been stuck in Coed C-3 for probably 11 seasons.  We decide to play the last game of the season, go out for pizza with the team, take a quick shower, drive to Vegas, get two hours of sleep, and then start driving the karts Thursday morning. 

The Champs: Diamond, Tony, Bonnie, Doug, Al, Joel, Stacey, Mary, Jason, Ted, Sue, Wayne
(not pictured:  Our third basewoman, Bits)

I'm on a roll at the plate.  The ball looks like the size of a basketball.  I feel like I can hit a trashcan with line drive anywhere in right field.  The past five games I've been doing hit-and-run plays whenever a girl is on first base, and I haven't got burned in about 8 consecutive tries.  I'm 16 for 16 in my last four games.  Perhaps I can have a hitting streak like back in the winter of 1999. We end up winning our last game of the season, to become the World Champions of Huntington Beach C-3 Coed Wednesday night softball.  Al is our pitcher, I think she has only walked two people the ENTIRE SEASON, and her on-base percentage is .711.  Our only problem now is that we will be moved up one division in January to C-2, and it seems like whenever a C-3 team moves up to C-2, they usually go 1-9 in the tougher league.  Must take preventative measures now to stop that from happening.... 
 

Phoneguys Coed Softball Team Onbase Percentage - Fall 2005