Saturday, I took the kart out to The Track At Centennial for one last hurrah with Daylight Savings Time. Once we go off of DST, the sun just goes down too damned early, so my karting opportunities will be limited.
Today the track was run "uphill," or counterclockwise, which was nice because it had been downhill the last 3 or so times out. And the session started with... a whimper. After a couple of easy laps to get the water temperature up, I started hammering it and got rewarded with stalls out of every other corner. Aaargh! This happened the last time out, but I thought I fixed it! How, I have no idea, but still...
This time, I limped back to the pits and noticed ENORMOUS vapor bubbles in the fuel lines. As in, no liquid between the tank and the filter. Huh? I thought this was a flooding condition. Maybe I just need to manually get the bubbles out. Okay, I'm an engineer, I can figure this out... The trouble was, I just couldn't evacuate the air out of the suction line upstream of the filter. That's when the lightbulb goes off... I have a leaking suction line! It's fuel starvation, not flooding!
This is when I find out for myself that karters are a helpful bunch... There were few other test-and-tune runners out there, but I went over to the guys running Arrow karts and begged some used fuel line from their mechanic. Success! Suddenly the suction line would stay full, and the stalling disappeared.
I managed to get about 10 decent laps in before I felt like I was going to fall out of my seat (man, I need to get one of those wrap-around style seats). I came in to rest and found that my wife had called... She was on her way to the track with the kids! She had never seen me at the track before, so that was cool. She even snapped some photos, including the attached. You'll notice as I'm headed toward pit exit that (a) I'm looking over my shoulder, which I still spend way too much time doing on the track, and (b) I have the lovely "X" on my rear number plate. That's my self-imposed "I'm a n00b" mark. Someday I'll drop that and affix number 29 to the bodywork to look more like a Real Racer. Someday...
As the sun went down, my wife drove a stint in a rental kart and concluded that she'd like to do it again sometime. She may not be thrilled with my second childhood driving karts, but I'll be happy with her acknowledgment that it actually is fun.
Fastest lap: 0:59.67 (best ever "uphill")
