Absolute mayhem in senior 100cc race (the pre-final) in this case. Two separate incidents in the first lap and a half took out the top 3-4 seeds from the week. The first incident is particularly hairy - two flipped karts.
Second incident that occurs shortly after, no flipped karts but clearly bent chassis. Hard to race all week and get that far just to have it all end so quickly and poorly.
Just starting to watch the past races, is it just me or does there seem to be allot of big names missing?
definitely not as popular this year thats for sure.
Not wanting to draw a correlation, but associating with F4 won’t do much in legitimizing the event. I know a lot of championships still do it, but I think nowadays your adult customer base might rather go SKUSA instead.
I don’t know about one year to the next, but ROK generally has not draw the participants that SKUSA has, that’s nothing new or surprising.
That said, a couple of factors are compounding the issue, which is that two of the ROK classes seem to be heavily on the decline - shifter and ROK GP.
The ROK shifter is on the decline because the US based shifter world seems to be rapidly standardizing on the KZ. This started when SKUSA lost the 175, and now ROK is on the outside looking in as the ROK shifters are apparently “out”. It wouldn’t be surprising to see ROK eventually replace their current shifter with a ROK KZ.
The ROK GP as well as the X30 classes for SKUSA have also been ravaged by the understandable migration to the 100cc TAG classes (KA/VLR). ROK Vegas 24 reflects this story well, and every 100cc class at ROK Vegas had extremely healthy and competitive fields. That’s where the numbers and the racing are. If you look at it from that point of view, I believe the event was a success.
I don’t see this happening any time soon, if ever. The parity of the Rok shifter is decent, and the cost is far lower than it’s KZ counterpart. Very few of the Vortex KZ engines exist in the US, so anyone entering down that path would have to essentially reinvent the wheel vs. the TM platform(s). The Rok Shifter platform is far from perfect, but still exists as a nice “club” type option for those looking for a more forgiving platform than a KZ.
From a theoretical point of view, I guess I can see where you’re coming from, but the grid sizes…seems like they’re going to eventually be forced to either drop or change things up. The “Pro Shifter” class at their biggest event having 16 karts isn’t great. (but maybe they don’t care, and the club scene will be all that matters to ROK)
(and as far as parity - I assume you mean the parity from one ROK shifter to the other and not parity with KZ, since everything I’ve ever heard is that KZ holds a big edge in performance)
KZ is interesting. There doesn’t seem to be much legs in spec-shifter programs. It makes sense given the level of support from manufacturers isn’t as solid as with the single gear stuff. This I must emphasise relates to bespoke kart engines, not road derived stuff like the Stock-Moto program which was subsidised by the fact it was… road derived.
KZ is a more trustworthy proposition from a conceptual point of view. Interesting to observe because there does seem to be fundamental differences between shifter and single-gear market trajectories. it’s nice to see the shifter crew keep it real