Yeah he drove the OTK for a season at Route 66 with us several years ago but has been a Merlin guy since he was in cadets.
As he said in his interview yesterday though, “it’s a go-kart, drive it right and it works the same as anything”.
Didn’t get to watch the X30 final but I always like going through and looking at the penalties after each race to see who has been naughty…
De Tulio with 12 pos for “various avoidable contact penalties”, Morgatto bounced from 2nd with a tech violation, ZCD for apparently wrecking and leaving his kart on the track, and then the usual bumper penalties and one swerving and one retaliation penalty for good measure.
Big win for Deukmedjian on his return!
I need Norberg to weigh in light every weekend. Adds to the drama to see how far he can get.
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I just got done going through those as well. Lyda refused to scale? It’s interest to see how harshly they penalize swerving
Common for someone to skip scales if the result was junk.
The whole looking-over-at-someone-and-swerving-into-them had gotten to be a real problem so they’ve been cracking down hard on it lately. I know Blake (race director) hates it and watches for it.
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In micro, the 37 was penalized very harshly for swerving. I know most folks don’t keep up with the cadets, but that is where it needs to be handled. Kudos to the race director.
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Yeah it needs to be stamped out in the junior categories so it doesn’t creep into the pro stuff when they move up.
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Bwoah
- Norberg vs DeMelo hits new heights
- De Tullio & Ramos get caught and DQed from Heat 1 for trying to push their bumpers back out
- Morgatto DQed for a tampered with engine seal (tried to break and re-seal) – a couple others got caught this weekend earlier on trying to do the same
- Arias returns and by the end of the weekend is back at full form and wins!
- Massimino and Carr so close, Carr’s best weekend to date and one of Pauly’s best too
Not to mention
- KA Senior for once wasn’t a wreckfest up front!
- Danny gets it done for OTK after AJ has a brake failure while LEADING!
- Palacio super strong as always in Mini
- Juniors a bit messy in both, but at least cleaner in KA Junior than it could’ve been.
Overall, good/big opening weekend in the series and for the month of Orlando with ROK and SKUSA coming in the next few weeks!
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Wow. None of those is a good look. Must be something in the water cooler at BirelART 
I also saw the onboard behind Norberg and his little juke into ZCD. Small move, big consequences for ZCD…
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Whose engine for Morgato? That’s way more newsworthy than the driver that got the public end of the DQ. 
Passing the collection plate so Nick can afford to buy enough lead for Lucas next year. That kid has squeezed every ounce he can get out of mini racing at this point. 
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Whats the penalty??
In the grey area that is rules/tech, purposely breaking a seal and trying to re seal seems like as black and white as it gets…
For Morgatto? He got DQ’d from 2nd place. Unless you mean for the engine builder?
I guess I expect a penalty harsher than that for breaking seals on an engine. Suspended a round? Kicked out of the series? Something…
Pretty easy to push a bumper back out if you can reach. Have done it before in practice. Pretty hard to catch out on track. A corner worker would have to see it live or catch you coming into the scales messing with it. Glad they are actively looking for it. Pretty sure a couple people got away with it at SKUSA Indy last year. Long straights and plenty of time to get your foot out there and push.
If it were a factory seal, I can see it being harsher. But since it’s just a series weekend seal and these aren’t factory sealed engines, it could be argued that it was a mistake or something less malicious. Obviously it wasn’t a mistake, but there is plausible deniability.
If you crack a factory sealed engine you really have no excuse other than you were trying to do something sneaky and illegal.
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Orlando’s scale line is the same place they queue their rental karts. So it is attached to their main building and has a bunch of windows looking out. Might have been the dumbest place to ever try to push your bumper back out in. One bystander ran out from the buidling into the scale line screaming bloody murder as he saw it happen. Plenty of GoPro’s around as well.
The big issue is that while it’s typically an automatic ejection and DQ from an event at SKUSA or ROK, and I believe STARS as well, the USPKS rulebook says it’s a DQ from the ‘race’. That could be interpreted as session or event. In this case, it was the former. Standard set for the season at least.
As for this, 100% agree. And Morgatto wasn’t the only one caught - I know of at least one other driver that was slated for one of the LCQs that attempted the same.
Honestly, there’s nothing more deflating for me personally after all the hard work put in to grow the sport than to see blatant cheating like either of the two instances. It’s really, really frustrating.
There’s a number of other things on the outcome of the weekend that got under my skin, too.
Maybe it’s wrong of me to take it personal. I’m not sure. But I’ve thrust our brand into being an industry leader with Happy Hour and being vocal about our pros and cons. Part of the job description for that.
Still not quite sure how to tackle it all tonight.
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While I don’t condone it in any form, blatant cheating has been a part of racing (or any sport really) for as long as they’ve been around. While it’s a black eye for whoever is caught doing it, it also gives some good talking points for news outlets or talk shows. While it’s not ideal, it seems that bad publicity usually makes it further into the outside world than good publicity. 
Man, if only most of the series owners and industry stakeholders in our sport understood this. It’d take a lot of heat off.
If I were you I’d probably keep names, teams, etc out of the conversation on Happy Hour; however as a sort of karting news outlet/broadcaster/analyst you can speak about the facts and penalties that were levied and discussion about such things and how they are handled or could be handled. If people want the full details they are obviously out there as far as who did what, but might keep heat off you to be more general with discussions.
USPKS always tries to post the penalties and they used to announce them so everyone in the paddock knew who messed up. But with the push-back bumpers now there are way more penalties so it’s not possible.
Because we always used to complain that people would cheat or drive like a dick and no one got heat for it.
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