DKC Super Endurance Race at Dallas Karting Complex - 12/6/11

[johnwag]

did they fill the 10 team slots?

[CosmosMpower]

I believe they did.

[OZMDD]

Updates?

[Nails]

Updates?

You're not there either?? Iain is out too. Glad I didn't waste gas to go out there to cheer my buds on. I figured it was a rain out anyway.

[OZMDD]

yeah, not a good plan to hold this event in Dec.

[altiain]

You're not there either?? Iain is out too.

Life got in the way. Between trying to get the S2000 fixed and a big presentaton I had to give to the BoD this morning, I decided it just wasn't in my best interest to stay out racing until 2 in the morning.

From what I've heard, the last place team got a 6 lap "adjustment" for running out of fuel and ended up winning? Sounds weird to me.

[goofygrin]

Long and the short of it... the event was pretty unorganized. You knew this going into it because there was a serious lack of details published before the event. The event started late, refueling took a very long time. Multiple karts had issues (more on this later). The lack of a water fountain is very, very problematic IMO. The Red Bull truck was awesome and the music was very cool to have while we were there.

We were supposed to start at 7:30, but the drivers didn't get out until around 8. Due to the refuelling taking too long, the racing ended around 12:15am. Tack on time for the awards ceremony and the hour drive back home and a lot of us weren't at home until 1:30-2am. On a weeknight.

4 hours in a kart (or 1 hour) is a LOT. At the end of a 30-35 minute stretch I had trouble getting out of the kart. My hands and wrists were very tired. You start making mistakes as well.

For clarification, karts were randomly selected, you drew a number out of a hat. No changes were allowed to the karts (no tuning, etc.).

Here's where it gets really ugly though. Right off the bat there were karts with issues. Those teams swapped karts, dealing with the time penalties to make the swap... but one team ran out of gas twice. Rather than suck it up like the rest of us (our kart had too much oil and smoked heavily in the first 30-40 minutes and had a miss on the long straights), they bitched and got laps added on, moving them from last place to first place, a position they held until the end, eventually "winning" the event. There's no telling what really happened, other than at least one team, IMO got screwed.

First place had a quite extensive prize list ($100 each to DKC, $100 to a restaurant, red bull, fancy jackets). 2nd and 3rd prizes were good. DFL got a boobie prize. Everyone else got nothing, no ribbon or tshirt for their participation.

So... the million dollar question... will I do it again? I dunno. On a weeknight? Likely not. We left the office around 5pm, had dinner in Princeton and then booked it there and were still late (6:40pm), traffic in McKinney was rough. Then we sat around for a while and then got into the racing. The level of competition was very, very good and the racing was clean in my experience, which was a bonus. My team was woefully short on talent (if I'm your fastest driver, you're fighting to not be DFL!), but we still made a fun night out of it.

[CosmosMpower]

Timing was screwy I saw a lap board showing the winning team in dfl 11 laps back with a slow fastest lap. I think the adjustment was much more than 6 laps.

Seemed like no matter how many people we passed we were stuck in 6 or 7th place. No idea how we ended 4 laps back at the end either with pretty good average lap times in the 72.0 to 73.0 ish range and no offs or major incidents.

[johnwag]

Kevin and Mike have done endurance races before, right? I would expect fueling and driving changes to be the most critical factors of the event.

Maybe a 2 hour endurance race would be better suited for most: roughly 30 minutes of seat time per driver, less wear on the karts, complete the race much earlier.....that's just a few positives i can think of.

[OZMDD]

Probably needs to be have better quality karts to make it work. Surprised the shifter karts weren't used. Would've made for better racing. Agreed about the 2 hour idea.

[johnwag]

Probably needs to be have better quality karts to make it work. Surprised the shifter karts weren't used. Would've made for better racing. Agreed about the 2 hour idea.

HA! There's no way that they would let 40 guys jump in $10,000 shifter karts. There's a learning curve to driving shifters, too. Even if they are above average drivers, there's still too much in maintenace on a shifter for them to be able to market it.

[modernbeat]

Terry Fair posted his thoughts about the event. And to say he was disappointed would be an understatement.

http://www.vorshlag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8010

[OZMDD]

Didn't realize they were that pricey. Still, for $500/team, I would've expected a well-planned event with dialed-in karts and a ready backups. Oh well.

[johnwag]

Didn't realize they were that pricey. Still, for $500/team, I would've expected a well-planned event with dialed-in karts and a ready backups. Oh well.

Yep. The Sodi rental karts they use are $4000-$5000 new, according to my friend who karts regularly.
.
$5000 for 4 hours is a nice haul for them. I roughly calculated that they have about $3000 in costs for that event between fresh tires and fuel for the karts, but that's slightly skewed because the tires will continue to be used after this event.

[creek]

The best run karting enduros I've seen involved twice as many karts as teams and the drivers were sitting in their kart in the pits when their teammate pulled in. A baton was passed between drivers by another member of the team. The number of karts was set so that each team drove each kart in rotation with spares brought in for breakdowns etc. Drivers ran multiple legs with with a maximum number of laps per leg.
The old indoor kart facilities in Dallas ran these like a bowling league on weeknights. Beat the hell out of bowling.

[CosmosMpower]

Terry Fair posted his thoughts about the event. And to say he was disappointed would be an understatement.

http://www.vorshlag.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8010

We all had fun and it wasn't a bad event from a social/fun aspect but you couldn't call it a serious racing/competition which is why most of us signed up. To put it in autocross terms would be like someone hitting 3 cones or skipping a slalom in a run, but the organizers decide not give any penalties for the run.

As far as the shifter karts, I think they charge $125 for 10 minutes of rentals so there's no way they were going to let people use them to bang around for 4 hours at a $500.00 per team price tag. Also those things are crazy fast, someone would probably get hurt with the mixed level of experience.