Season Reviews With Pictures

Back in 2003, we met Dan Chiradonna at a Go Kart track down in Pevely MO for an "Arrive and Drive" session and also to be pit crew for Danny who was driving in the "Shifter" and TAG classes. Kris really liked the Arrive and Drive experience so I bought him a Margay TAG Kart for the 04 season with all the accesories to make him competitive. This taught us a lot about the sport and showed us what we needed to do to improve our skills. We finished tenth out of thirty four drivers our first season.

This is our second year of Karting and Kris is doing very well now that he has learned some of the skills necessary to race the cart in traffic and just what the kart is capable of. He is consistantly in the top five or six in his class on any given race day.

We have bought a new kart for this season. We're now driving an Intrepid Suzuka chassis model that is more consistent and more adjustable than our Margay "Limo" that we used last year. We also have the additional feature of better brakes with the optional front disks that really help us be competitive in TAG (Touch and Go), TAG is a class of karts with "hands off" engine modifications and weight limits. The engines are pushbutton electric start and stop with small generators to maintain the battery. Technology has come to Go Karting. These Karts are scored by using a standard racing car transponder mounted to the sidepod, and also have onboard computers on the steering wheel that give the driver both digital and graphic readouts of his engine temps, RPMs and track times. Very much like the F1 equipment.

The engines are mostly around 125ccs and 27 horsepower. There are five or six engines legal for this class and minimum weights vary to make each engine competitive. We're currently running a Parilla Leopard which seems to be the ideal setup for the SLKA track. Other engines may work better for other tracks with different turn/straight percentages.

For our TAG Heavy class with the Parilla engine and running front brakes, we must weigh at least 410 pounds kart and driver combined and the driver must weigh at least 200lbs in race trim. This is good for 0-100-0 mph in about 7 seconds. That's pretty good performance. Better than any production street car. The Pevely track allows about 75mph top speed on the back straight and the karts average almost 60mph around the track. That's flying!

Our best qualifying position is second and our best finish is third in feature races. Kris consistently finishes in the top ten and finished the season fourth overall in the TaG Heavy even though he has missed four races due to having a summer job at the Scout Camp outstate.

The pictures here are from the Oct. 11th outing at SLKA and we were running the track "backwards" from the normal CCW direction. Kris's best time of 40.03 was second fastest in our class for the day. The above picture is the turn one start with Kris on the outside front row. On the left is Kris waiting on the grid for the Karts to pull out onto the track for the start of the TAG Heavy feature. He spun out yet still finished fifth setting his personal best track time trying to catch back up to the pack.

The links below are for PG racing which supports our equipment and provides advice and assistance at the track, and SLKA which is the sanctioning body that regulates racing at the Pevely track where we compete.

Also Check out Kris and Dan Chiradonna at SLKA our First Time doing an arrive and drive at Pevely Here