The 6 Heuers of Kartrrera PanOlympia

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Curtis Creager
I would just like to say real quickly. What an absolutely awesome event today, I really hope this becomes a tradition for some off season racing.

If I didn’t say it already or clearly, dang cold. I know that I should’ve…

Thanks to Apex Karting & staff very nicely done!

Thanks to Rod and Randy for putting this together...when can we do it again, huh, huh!?

Thanks to all the racers and safety crew & turn workers. I want you to know I truly have a great deal of respect for all of you and the dedication that you bring to our sport. It was an honor for me to go racing with all of you, personally I don’t think I could have run against a finer group of drivers. As for the worker's fund donation you've all earned it and then some!

Too my teammates; We did it, way to go guys!

I think I drank a little to much Milk:eek:



See you at the NWERS 6hr Enduro!


Sincerely,
Curtis Creager







...Lynn, thanks for the coin :rolleyes: Thomas give me a furled black flag next time :D
 
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Yes! That was really a lot of fun everybody. Thanks to everyone who helped organize and run the event, you all did a great job! I cant wait to do it again next year.

Curtis: you did an excellent job as team captain! The rest of the team as well, you all did great! I thought it ran like clockwork.
 
Amen Brothers! I woke up rather stiff and sore this morning but it was all worth it!

Me personally, and our team collectively had a great time, capped off nicely with the win! Thanks Rod and Randy for organizing the event. Pretty cool that we got the chance to fill up the worker fund coffers prior to the start of the racing season too.

As for doing it again, absolutely! I think this makes for a great break in the off-season and is good preparation for the upcoming Enduro!
 
The whole thing was great fun, even from the side lines. Some of us were wishing that we knew who got the "sputter" button the most times. They should get a special award. Hopefully Bobbie Smethers will post his picture of the worker team driver, Dom, getting stuffed into the wall and then T-boned. I bet Dom has some bruises on his ribs this morning. Other than a few pig piles, then event was really pretty smooth. Hopefully Walker doesn't have too much damage to repair. How about it Walker?

Rob
 
I had a great time too, and, well, my share of sputter buttons. Mostly Friday night, but once in each of my stints Saturday too.

I'm pretty sore today, as I did one 35 minute stint, and one nearly 50 minute stint. I was flopping around in the kart pretty good at the end.

Congratulations to the winning team, they did a masterful job, proved by the winning margin of 5 or 6 laps. In contrast, the difference between second and third place after six hours and over 600 laps, was less than six seconds, with the rest of the field covered by less laps than the winning team beat second place.

Conference members proved themselves to be the equal of anybody, when every team got into the sub 31 second lap times, and half the teams recording sub 30 second best laps. Well done everybody.

I'm also very pleased to say that a collective $1000.00 donation was made to the Conference worker's fund, on behalf of team "Eye Patch Racing". Thank you everyone, very much, for your generous support of our most excellent professional volunteers.

It would be great if we could make this an annual event, with a perpetual trophy. I know Walker welcomes us back since he made the comment to me after the race that he would love to run an enduro for us once a month.

I hope everyone enjoyed themselves, and found their competitive fires being stoked. Let's take that enthusiasm now, go to work getting ready, and get our entries in for our season opening "6 Hours of Pacific Raceways".
 
This was just fantasic. Thanks for including me. I'm a little sore, but mostly from smiling for 6+ hours.

I learned a lot about driving in general and a bunch about driving in karts. Who would have figured, leaning was so important.

Thanks to everyone for putting this on.

A special thanks to Walker. He worked very hard and I personally feel that the administration of the event was flawless. The sputter button was pretty much spot on. I got it twice!
 
Wow that was such good times! Thanks to Walker and the Apex staff for putting up with 60 type A personalities!
Thanks to Rod and Randy for spending the time to put this together to benefit the workers fund.

Congrats to Team Eye Patch you guys earned and deserved the win. Well played.

The inverted start was a surprise. We started 7th and worked our way to 3rd by the first fuel stop. Bad racing luck stuck us with an un-driveable kart #36 after the swap. That’s racing. We lost 5 laps in that Kart. The team that got that kart after us only ran 10 laps with it before trading in. We did not think of that, but should have. The second fuel stop got us in a good kart and we all picked up laps back with it. It was great fun battling with Mike Olsen, getting passed and then passing him back! Made the day worthwhile!
Battling with Randy Blaylock for what 20 laps? Finally he passed me and set out after him but he was just plain faster then me.

Watch Elliott battle with Curtis was great fun what a show. Then we came to Ben’s last stint and second stint for the team. He and Tony (blue helmet way fast) battle for 20 of the last 30 minutes swapping fast laps were great to watch. Both of them running 29 second laps, lap after lap.
We ended up 5th. That’s racing boys…..if it was easy everyone would do it.

Please put my Team down for next year. Good times for a good cause at a great facility.

Thanks to my Teammates I was proud to be your Captain you all did a great job.
Steve Clinton
Ashis Vaidya
Jeff Fry
Elliott Ladik
Ben Glosser
 
Scott, I had a blast running with Elliott. I am not sure how many laps it took him to catch me nor do I know how many it took him to finally get passed. But it was the cleanest racing, and most challenging racing I've had with another driver.

I saw him put the nose of that kart on both sides of me at least five times. I remember we crossed the timing & scoring line and he had a slightly better drive out of that turn. We where heading to turn one and he was right next to me on my left, but I held my line and he made the right decision at the last possible sec just as we turned in to turn one to pull in behind. I have to say my second stint was the best it was defiantly because of this battle.

I am in for the next six hour. Hell I am in if this goes to 12hrs! I don't think I am steeping out of line when I say that Team EPR will be back!

I say we raise the bar and double the money for the workers fund. Start saving that paper route money boys!
 
Getting up at 4:30 to make the trip was WORTH IT!!! I am like most of you all, sore in spots that I didn't remember having... That was a lot more work in such a short time than driving a car!.

I am looking forward to slowing down another team the next time around :)
 
Final Result and Thoughts

Wow! What an awesome event!

Thank you all for participating. Overall the behavior of everyone that raced is a testament to the professionalism of your sport, and each and every one of you should be proud of yourselves.

It should go without saying that you are all welcome back. I'm ready to host another race as soon as you can put together 10 more teams. (Who's up for March?) The karts handled the event so well that we had walk-in customers racing 20 minutes after your race was over. Kudos to Daryle and Nick for getting the karts ready. A special shout out to Ben Wallace (works and Cabella's in the boat shop) for his help in the shop during the race. Ben has almost 3 years of experience working as a mechanic in a kart racing facility in Phoenix. You can't buy that kind of experience!

Attached (if it worked) is a PDF file of the final results. I tried to post the lap by lap results but the file is too big to post.

Finally, a big Thank You to Rod for having the crazy idea (which turned out to be not so crazy!), and to Randy for letting Rod railroad him into helping.


LET'S DO IT AGAIN!!!!!

Walker Armstrong
Apex Karting, Inc.
 
Two thoughts here if I may. I didn't make it last Saturday due to a serious sinus infection which had me on the couch all week-end, but.
My team had 2 bad karts during the event, which cost them apparently 7 to 10 laps. So if a team, through no fault of their own, encounters a bum kart, could everyone else be put on the sputter button until the bad kart has been replaced and that team is back on track? That would save that team from being thrown back to a position that is impossible to recover from.
Secondly, the younger guys, and ringers, were apparenly able to run up to 45+ minute stints, which relegated the older Conference guys to the back because they only ran 20 or 25 munutes before being too winded to continue.
Could the sessions be held to a max of 30 minutes to give the older guys a fighting chance?
 
Your team wasn't the only team to have kart issues, several other teams ran karts that had handling characteristics they didn't like, some bad and some worse, my team included. The kart we had for the last segment understeered terribly, but we took it as a challenge to overcome this. Eventually Patrick Boyle turned the fastest time of the event in that kart, with the exception of a single lap by a local ringer who has 6000+ laps at the track, who beat his lap time by a very small margin. Well done Patrick.

Another team (not yours) had to get two replacement karts, one from a flat tire, and one from some other issue, and lost several laps, but still had a fantastic time. I'm pretty sure everybody had a fantastic time, regardless of their finishing position. I certainly didn't see anything but ear to ear grins afterwards.

So, there will be no normalizing or compensating for issues beyond anyone's control. That's life, and that's racing. If that's a issue that is going to get in the way of having fun, there are plenty of people who will fill up the grid.

The stint length question is a quandary. The fact of the matter is, anything longer than 10 or 15 minutes takes stamina. There really isn't any difference between 30 minutes and 45 minutes, or even an hour. Once you get past 20 minutes and relax, it's more or less about consistency more than anything.

Limiting the stints to 30 minutes might tighten up the results a little, but I doubt it. Again, if you can go 30 minutes, you can probably go 45 or more. If you can't go 30 minutes, setting the maximum stint length at 15 or 20 minutes is the next logical step, but we're just not going to do that. If we do, we might as well just line up and see how many time we can get in and out of the karts in an hour and call it a race.

I did a couple of long stints, and I'm still sore today. Kart racing is as much about precision and smoothness as it is about physical conditioning. We will have another event for sure next year, so I can plan and I'll be sure to include some specific exercises into a routine to condition myself beyond my normal routine now of no routine.

In the end, this event was about gathering people together to have fun, and raise a little money for a good cause. We accomplished both. That's what it will be about next year too.
 
Everyone had to deal with kart issues of one form or another. The fact that every team drove three seperate karts should (and did) eliminate anyone's complaints of having an unfair advantage due to mechanicals.

The race was won by driving consistant laps. Our teammate, Ryan, had the 7th fastest time of the event...hardly what I would call a ringer.

Curtis Creager, certainly no spring chicken, pulled a 45 minute stint; Fred and I both did +30 mins. A driver change took less than a lap (a quick one, start to finish was about 15 seconds, roughly half of a lap).

I watched as more than a few teams had pit stops lasting for a lap or more. Spin-outs on track requiring a worker to fish-out the driver were good for another lap. Or how about the three or so times that a neck brace fell off because someone didn't fasten it properly? That was worth a bunch of laps while the workers had to flag the driver to pit, then run and get the neck brace.

Oh yeah, then there was that little surprise at the start with the inverted grid where EPR was suddenly at the back of the pack!

One thing is for certain, and obvious to anyone in attendance: a good time was had by all with some good racing action on and off the track. The worker fund is now $1000 richer and there are 58 racers who have honed their skills a bit more and are ready to face this year's Conference season.

It was, afterall, a karting event...for fun...
 
Okay, so the small issues that could be massaged won't be. Fair enough, just thought I would ask what could make it a tad better, but since I wasn't there I only have what my team shared with me to go by, and according to them there were a few issues to be worked out.
 
They're not small issues actually, we put a lot of thought into things, and it depends upon your perspective what's better.

In fact, the response to eliminating the mandatory stint lengths was overwhelmingly positive, and the kart issues were as even distributed as could be reasonably expected and still resemble a bona fide race.

At least that's the consistent feedback I have gotten from people that were there.
 
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