Round 03, 2006 – share your experiences pls

hmmm gotta learn from mistakes?…hahaha…lots of karts looses its chain on rnd3….even for me..i did not bang the curbs…peace.

Rd 3 was no different than previous rounds with respect to kart conditions…..totally unpredictable. You can win one round and lose the next. There were at least four or five k2 drivers who had to retire due to mechanical problems….problems that were avoidable…pity!

However, out of the many problems, I thought chains ‘putus’and ‘brakes tak makan’ or sprocket ‘dah habis gigi’ are the three common occurances that can easily be detected and rectified. All of these components are fast running items of wear and tear and more so if they are rented racing karts. What this means was that citykarting did not do sufficient tests or checks on the karts prior to mykart’s raceday. Drive chains (like your car drive belts) should be replaced after so many hours. Sprockets have teeth which can be seen with the eye whether its ok or not. Brakes, my god!, citykarting should have tested it before raceday at the very least.

Granted these are rental karts, but the components above need to be checked and replaced anyway sometime…and all we need is citykarting to give mykart, a very good long term client, a little bit of premium treatment and check the 3 items before raceday. Yes, I would have given Fazz a better run to the finish in the finals, if kart 27 had some decent brakes …..hehehe!

My concern is that, too frequent of these avoidable mechanical failures could lead to more feelings of frustration from members and make them lose interest….hopefully not.

I suggest the Technical Director’s team (who?)to meet up with citykarting on an agreed date to discuss this issue.

Hidup my-kart!

[quote=TheFazz]One thing that I will not do next time is run 15 karts in the K3 class without sufficient spares (at least 5).
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From my personal viewpoint, I know quite a few K3 drivers had a very frustrating day and to some extent to some K2 drivers too as there were no spare or just lousy karts available if one of the karts break down.

Moreover, some of the K3 karts are basically “lemon”. This can be very frustrating as you become non-competitive at all from the start but merely a passenger on the kart. This doesn’t go down well with any of the karters as the main reason we are there is to compete and to compete as evenly as possible. BUT we have to understand that we are running on rental karts and performance do varies from kart to kart.
I did spoke some of the mechanics regarding the tuning & handling of some of the karts and the feedback is they did tune up the karts to be as even as possible but as time goes on, they couldn’t be testing every kart as they are quite tied-up with the daily rental karts and some private karts.
To help Citykarting to improve the kart conditions, we need to provide a checklist of feedback to them to work on. In order for that to happen, we need the help of the karters to fill up the checklist of the kart they raced on after each race.
It is not good if only my-KART is providing the feedback report as City Karting shall develop the form for other rentor to fill up too.

I do understand due to time constraint, we try to minimise the number of races as much as possible. But running without spare karts or very minimum spare karts is indeed running on a very thin wire. I know this as I did organised a private race before with 13 karts per heat and even with that we face having spare kart problems.

IMHO, the most ideal race is to run K3 race with 11 karts max per heat and 8 karts max per heat for K2.

The fiasco in the K3 Heat 1 lap chart recording is somehow directly related to the spare karts availability. Some of the karts are practically not in ideal running condition and the karters changed the kart before the race or during the race without informing the marshals somehow confused the lap charter and that resulted in the delay of starting the final race as race positions need to be sorted out slowly.
To avoid such confusion in the future, we will need 1 marshal at the pit to oversee the changing of karts and record the change of kart. The record to be provided to the lap charter at the end of the race.
At the start/finish line, a minimum of 3 marshals shall be available. 1 marshal to record the kart positions on each lap, 1 marshal to read out the kart number to lap charter marshal & 1 marshal to change the lap display + to look out for any distress kart + waving of chequred flag.

[quote=siewweng]”As for me, i had a frustrating day. Whilst Q1 went my way, Q2 was a heart breaker. After leading comfortably for much of the race, the kart failed on the very last lap with 5 turns to go.”

Fazz…looks like my bad omen went to u this race.bad luck!!
from the comments here, looks like it was a round to forget.
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For some maybe but not for me. This is the most interesting round for me so far this year. Was having a lot of dog fights from Q1 to final.

“For some maybe but not for me. This is the most interesting round for me so far this year. Was having a lot of dog fights from Q1 to final.”

great dogfights definitely give more satisfaction than driving alone for 7 laps, even though its a good position like 2nd or 3rd. nothing beats the joy of winning obviously :p …bila ni….

[quote=TheFazz][quote=Nohad]To help Citykarting to improve the kart conditions, we need to provide a checklist of feedback to them to work on. In order for that to happen, we need the help of the karters to fill up the checklist of the kart they raced on after each race.
It is not good if only my-KART is providing the feedback report as City Karting shall develop the form for other rentor to fill up too.[/quote]

How do we implement this? We need to develop this procedure properly.[/quote]

We shall develop a checklist form for each individual kart used. (We can somehow follow the concept prepared by Kartquest but with a little extra remarks such as the handling of the kart (understeering, oversteering, vibration, etc…), engine performance,brakes and so on) The technical adviser will mark down some the obvious defects prior to the race but the drivers will have to fill the feedback columns (if any problem) in order for the technical adviser to quickly inform the mechanics to work on the problem if possible.

I will try to work out a format for this.

[quote=TheFazz][quote=Nohad]IMHO, the most ideal race is to run K3 race with 11 karts max per heat and 8 karts max per heat for K2.[/quote]

Agreed. However, Citykarting had promised more karts precisely to allow us to run 15 karts in one heat.
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This is the same problem I faced during my one & only privately organised event. We were provided with 15 karts too and we ran 13 karts but a couple of the karts are basically sputtering around. The problem is at least 4~5 of the karts are not in ideal running condition.
On 80cc karts, I can basically live with a kart with a bit of poor handling (what can you expect from a rental kart which might have climbed up the tyre wall before) but not with a “lemon” engine. That practically kills your race. I can still remember seeing Tom Tan whistling away and tapping his fingers in rhythm with his whistling on the steering wheel when I overtook him during rd10 last year when he got a “lemon” kart.
It is OK for a total “freshie” as it might not make much of a difference to the person but it affects the top drivers who are basically fighting for every single championship point. The person will just go home with an empty feeling and will lose interest if these things keep going-on.

Furthermore, sometime we have crashes in the race and that can sometime practically put a kart or a couple of karts out of action. If we are running full house, we are in danger of having no spare karts at all for some of the participants to participate if all the spare karts have been used up and broke down.

Overall, this brings back to co-operation of all participants to provide feedbacks on the kart you raced on, in order for the technical adviser & event director to feedback to the company providing the karts to action on it. Need more volunteers for this leh!
It might not be able to solve the problems on the current race but might minimise the problems for the future races.

Somehow, I find the K2 100cc engines to be quite balanced out for all the karts except for the handling of some of the karts.