[Fot] Sandia Race Report

[David W. Riddle]

This past weekend (8/10-8/12) Tyler and I made the six hour trek from 
Mesa to Albuquerque to run at Sandia Motorsports Park.

We had just pulled out of Mesa and travelled about four miles on the 
Beeline Highway when something prompted me to ask Tyler if he had his 
driving boots packed.  He checked and he did not.  We turned around 
sprinted the twelve miles back home.  That little side trip would 
cost me a little bit because the combined 24 mile detour left us 2.6 
miles short of a Gas Station in Payson!

Fortunately we were hauling race karts and gear in the 
trailer.  Coasted to a stop on the side of the road, opened the 
trailer and poured in two gallons of mixed race gas into the tank. 
With 110 octane unleaded race gas costing $7 a gallon and a bottle of 
the castor (two bottles to five gallons) we mix with the gas also 
costing $7 each the per gallon cost of fuel to get us off the highway 
was almost $20!  In case we had this same issue further on in the 
trip I took the opportunity to fill one of our gas jugs with 5 
gallons of the "cheaper" premium pump gas.

Since it was going to be a long weekend we stopped in Holbrook for 
the night before pushing on to Albuquerque the next morning to run 
test sessions that afternoon.

The Club at Sandia that was organizing the event had never had karts 
run with them so they decided to have us run the shorter track layout.

The Sandia track seems to have started life as a small banked oval 
track they had grew some lop-sided Mickey Mouse ears at each 
end.  This means that the front and back straights of the oval serve 
to connect the two ends of the road course.  Because of the banking 
of the oval you literally jump into and out of the oval across those 
transitions.

Running the short version of the track meant that once the drivers 
jumped into the oval on the back straight they would continue around 
the oval back to the front straight and then jump out the other 
side.  Taking this shorter route the 125 shifter karts were "only" 
doing 87-88 mph when they left the track surface (just before the 
braking zone).  If they had run the full course and jumped into and 
out of the oval on the front straight they would have been doing at 
least 100 mph leaving the oval.  Considerably more stopping power and 
time required to get around turn one onto the road course with very 
little run off room on the outside.

The data trace for this section of track is kind of 
interesting.  Just before the "jump" out of the oval Tyler hits 90 
mph (at 54.484 seconds into the lap).  2 tenths of a second (54.607) 
later the data shows he is doing 99.2 mph and a hundredth of a second 
after that (54.698) he is back to 88.7 mph.  You can certainly see 
that the kart is airborne for that fraction of a scond.  Two and a 
half seconds after that he has braked down to 68.5 mph to enter Turn 1.

The data acquisition on the kart showed that Tyler was hitting a good 
2 G's going through the banked Turn 1 of the road course and a 5 
second sustained 1.5 G load going through the banked portion of the oval.

As the weekend progressed Tyler started to experiment with different 
approaches to the very fast Turn 1 and was soon driving it very 
differently then anyone else.  Most were taking a classic stay wide 
and late apex the corner. Tyler on the other hand looked like he was 
giving a quick hard stab to the brake and downshifting just before 
the corner.  This would upset the rear end of the kart and allowed 
him to rotate it through the corner and be back on the gas 
accelerating before the apex.  The sound difference was pretty 
amazing.  He was on the gas a full 20-30 feet before the other 
shifters were.  The data showed that by the time he was hitting the 
highest G load into that corner (7 tenths of a second later) he had 
already accelerated to 72.8 mph which is 4 mph faster.

Watching him I was thinking that this was going to kill the tires as 
the track surface was pretty abrasive.  I could not see his line on 
most of the track so I don't know what he was doing there but 
whatever it was he was actually conserving the tires.  I checked the 
tire temps of the other karts around us after the sessions and 
whereas their front and left rear tires were in the 130 degree range 
their right rear tires were in the 150's.  Tyler on the other hand 
consistently came in with all four tires in the 130's.

He did the four test sessions on Friday and the first practice on 
Saturday with the tires that were on the kart (for a total of seven 
heat cycles) before we put new tires on to finish out the 
weekend  (five sessions) and he was not complaining of a lack of grip.

For the race on Saturday Tyler had qualified third in the 125 
shifters (this would be only his third race in this class) and he 
despite making a horrible start that saw him fall down the grid to 
sixth place by Turn 1 he managed to claw his way back up and finish 
the race in third.  In doing so he had some great close 
wheel-to-wheel racing with William Herr and Mike Laycook.

For Sunday's race we changed the gears to run the same ratio that the 
1st, 2nd and 4th placed karts were running and Tyler qualified in 
second position.  This time he did not muck up the start.  However, 
on the exit of Turn 1 he did not give enough "racing room" to the 
kart on the outside in Pole position and forced that kart to the dirt 
on the outside.  Fortunately that driver kept control and got it back 
on track after losing a few places.

Karmic damage was done however and while Tyler did manage to take the 
lead and hold it for five laps he eventually lost the lead and trying 
to either make a low percentage move on the new leader or just trying 
a different line he hooked the left rear wheel off the track in a 
tight left hand corner and spun off.  A kindly corner worker gave him 
a push and got him going again at least two laps down.  However that 
Bad Karma was not through with him yet.  Two laps later as he was 
coming through the tight banked right hand Turn 6 the left rear wheel 
sheared the studs off the hub (probably due to damage from the 
previous incident) and sent the tire bouncing across the 
in-field.  Tyler managed to drive the now three-wheeled kart back to the pits.

I think he got in enough laps for a finish so we will come away from 
that race with some points at least.

I also got to meet up with fellow FOT (Friends of Triumph 
http://www.fot-racing.com/) driver Greg Hilyer and see him pedal his 
plum colored TR4 around the track in the Vintage group.  All-in-all 
it was a good weekend.  Of course the sticker on the back of my 
Porsche does say "A Bad Day at the Track beats a Good Day at the Office"

There were a ton of photos taken that I posted up to our clubs 
website http://www.southwestkarters.com/ (but then broke the site 
working on it earlier today. Doh!  It's not completely fixed yet but 
here is a link to the gallery.

http://www.southwestkarters.com/?page_id=51&lzkfile=SandiaAug07%2F

This is a picture of Tyler going into Turn 1:
http://www.southwestkarters.com/?page_id=51&lzkfile=SandiaAug07%2FRSR_3299.jpg