Friday was an awesome day. Not only was it Deepavali, a festival of lights celebrated by the Indian community throughout the world, but it was Race Day number 2 for the ENT department.....This time around we had twice the participants and we gathered at Shah Alam's City Karting circuit for our event.
While the weather has been someone erratic since the preview of 2012 (aka The Apocalypse) with Tsunami off the coast of Indonesia, Mt Merapi exploding away in Yogyokarta, Twisters in Perlis, Floods in Kedah.......we harboured a slim hope of good weather for race day..... Bearing in my mind that Murphy has a funny law not to be reckoned with, I decided against washing my car before the race. (Please tell me I'm not the only fella who seems to invite rain after washing the car. No wash, no rain!)
Anyway good thing for not washing the car, and I guess lady luck smiled kindly upon us too. The weather was glorious. It was clear with a slight overcast and temperature of 32 degrees Celcius on the track by the time we started at 9am. Just enough to get the track heated up and the tires primed for the race.
Karts are 80cc 2 stroke engines. Lighter and more torque as compared to the ones in Sepang Go Kart which uses the 4 stroke engines. The track per se is easy to learn and with the 80cc Karts, one doesn't really need to apply the brakes, just release of the accelerator and re-accelerate is sufficient to hug must corners. Downside is the Karts are not well maintained.....Disparity between Karts are high enough to cause obvious differences in terms of power and performance. As an example, the fastest Kart can have almost a 5 second advantage per lap from 85% of the other Karts, which means in a race where each lap averages between 1 min 15s to 1 min 20s, by 13th or 14th lap the first Kart would have lap others.....Almost like pitting a Ferrari against Team Proton (should we have enough clout or have thick enough skin to form one someday).
Overall it was still an amazing race. 12 minutes of practice. 12 minutes of qualifying for fastest lap (transponder on the Karts made it possible to be electronically timed....WHOA!!). And finally 15 laps of race. On average each lap was between 1 min 15s to 1 min 30s....which means most of us made 7 to 8 laps for the first 2 heats. While 15 laps translated to about 25 to 30 minutes of race in total.
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| Karts stacked in storage |
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| Pre-race inspection |
And like most race, we were not spared with the typical trials and scandals of the track....
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| Pre-race speculation |
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| Spin outs |
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| Accidents..... Ralph Schumacher style of flying cars |
They say you can lead a man out from the primitive, but you cannot remove the primitive out from a man....
When pitted against competition, stress, expectations to perform, and pride/ego....men all throw down their armour and do their worse or best..... but regardless of the above..... the most important thing was everyone had fun and hopefully we will have Race Day 3 in the near future.....
oowwwhhh...didnt champ this time around ya?? still make a good story though...;)
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