In this session I sent Riley out in the old CRG Honda then chased him down from about a half lap back in the KZ. This was his second day in the shifter, he did great. He was within 1 second of my time. I drove both karts earlier in the day and ran the same lap time within a few hundredths. The KZ has 20 lbs of lead on it though. The KZ was 6 mph faster on the main straight and about 2 mph slower min speeds in all turns. The track/tire combo has way less grip than back in the day, I was off my early 2000âs pace by 2 seconds. Apparently the current pave job doesnât take rubber, and the modern tires just arenât as sticky as the Bridgestones we used to run here.
Pretty cool to experience the differences in the karts back to back like that, and it was the first time my we have been on the track together in shifters. This is the track where my dad and I started racing shifters 24 years ago. I really thought about him a lot during the day. Good times.
Driver is now well and our handling issue is sorted, but in twenty five years of racing he has only run in the rain two other times. And never in a KZ level machine. Same goes for the crew chief.
Final mock race from todayâs âshifter fun dayâ at Orlando. We had 10 or so shifters, did morning open practice sessions, then after lunch we did an informal 5 lap quali, and then did three 10 lap heats. We also ran a fresh new layout that hasnât been run before.
I got pole and led the first heat wire to wire (boring video). In the second one we inverted the starting order and I ended up midpack after some chaos on the first lap ahead of me (gopro died before the start).
For this one, we drew numbers and I started in the back. Ended up battling for second and finished third. Kart came in kinda late and I had the fastest pace, I think I could have won a 15 lapper.
Overall awesome day, canât wait for the next race on the 8th.
Itâs awesome that you guys seem to have a pretty solid group of regulars there running shifter. Makes me want to try to make the trip down from Atlanta to run a local OKC event at some point. We need to see if we can get a handful of you guys to make the trip up to AMP too!
Ripper of a start! That configuration around the outside into T1 looks fun. I enjoyed driving that track in X30 and would love to come run it in a KZ sometime.
On-board of my first heat from SuperNats. Kart wasnât working great yet, but I crashed in heat two and my engine fell off in heat three, so this is about the only decent footage I have from the weekend.
Nice driving! I notice you often had to make multiple moves with the wheel on entry to keep it on line. Did it feel like an entry push that would snap oversteer?
Replying to you and RobâŚ
Big entry understeer on this setup. This is when we were still struggling to find the correct setup and we were trying to stiffen and raise the rear to dig the tire into the track. After I decided to do a 180 on setup and put in the super soft axle my steering inputs on entry were about 1/4 of this. I wanted to try some things on setup but they were a little extreme, but I showed the BestKart guys this footage and they said âwow okay yes try somethingâ.
Footage from heat 3 and the LCQ after I changed the axle and rear ride height and the kart started working as intended:
The BestKart responds really well to axle changes. I have been discussing a lot with the team and my mechanic (dad) regarding how we work this kart vs. the OTK we had been on for the last ten years. The BestKart focuses a lot on rear end adjustments and less so on the front. The adjustments you make to the rear of the kart make a large difference in the handling, and the front end is less sensitive compared to the OTK, which is basically the opposite. We would make a lot of front end adjustments on the OTK, and basically leave rear track, axle, and ride height similar throughout a weekend. This makes sense; the BestKart runs no front bar 90% of the time and a softer front end, the OTK has a front bar in at all times and requires a stiffer front setup. So naturally wherever the stiffness is in the chassis is where the adjustments will affect the most.
For the BestKart we find that axle changes really affect the full balance of the kart. A softer axle will really help the kart rotate on entry. On the OTK the rear and front end felt more disconnected in how adjustments affected the handling. You could put a different axle in and it would change how the rear of the kart felt, but the front would react more or less the same.
Itâs just a different tuning philosophy that we still are understanding. When youâve got 10 years on one brand it is easy to know exactly which direction to go after every session. With just 4-5 races on a kart that works totally differently, sometimes it has taken us a few sessions to figure out if we are heading the right direction or not. After this past weekend I really feel like I understand how the kart likes to be run a lot more, especially in low grip. So when we get back out there next time I have a better idea of which adjustments to make right away after each session, and I have a better feel of where the baseline setup should start each weekend and what our progression should be as the weekend progresses.
My guess is the lack of front bar. The front end is generally softer so less responsive to changes? The LF and RF arenât as tied together as most karts running a bar.
Whoops missed the paragraph were you said the exact same thing.
Just watching the videos and watching Nixx you just donât seem to come off the corner nearly as well. Youâd make up a lot on entry just to get pulled off the corner.
Yeah he is definitely rolling off the corner better. I was over-slowing the final corner and some of the tight stuff trying to get it to rotate.
This was also the medium-soft chassis where I ran the soft chassis all year, so we probably were just generally running the kart stiffer than usual. I may decide to go with the soft chassis for myself next season as my baseline. For the SuperNats the soft chassis probably was a better choice but we thought there would be more rubber. But something that flexed a bit easier would benefit when there isnât lateral load to flex the kart.
