Dirt Racin'

Every Monday night my dad and I load the van up and head out to the county for some old fashioned dirt track kart racing. Back when I was a teenager we used to race on the paved road course in Leamington but this is our first year on dirt. The general idea of the club is a bunch of guys racing for fun, without spending too much money on parts and engines. But each race seems to bring a desire for more horse power.

I've loved auto racing all my life and this is a fun, relatively cheap way to do it. There are about 30 karts that race each week. I run in the regular class which is usually split into 2 groups of 10-12 karts, depending how many guys show up each week. We run 3 heats. My dad runs in the senior class which just runs one heat each week.

As my dad was getting ready to start his only race of the night, I flicked the ignition switch to "on" and yanked on the pull cord to start the 6.5hp engine...Snap. The pull cord broke. With no quick alternative to start the engine, his day was done. I felt bad after he spent all week to get the kart ready to go. I offered to let him run one of my heats so he could at least get some racing in, but he didn't seem to mind not racing. I still felt bad, even though it wasn't really my fault (I warned him a few days earlier that the cord looked fairly worn out).

Luckily we were able to fix the pull cord before my next race. I didn't win...but I did alright, and didn't break anything else on the kart...just bent the back bumper and exhaust.

The second photo is my dad running a few laps for fun at the end of the day. The last photo is a few weeks worth of rubber exchange. You can check out a complete gallery of photos that my dad and I have taken from all the races at www.fog.calebest.com. More photos from this day will be up there shortly...as soon as I'm done posting this....hey, that's right now.