Rick,
Back in the 1960s all I dreamed about was road racing, while almost all my friends were hot Rodders or into drag racing. The only racing info we really had back in those days was Road & Track, and Car & Driver magazines with a racing section each month that was a good 3 months behind the times. Road & Track;s section was written by Rob Walker. Then I found Chris Economacki’s(?) National Speed & Sport weekly paper, a real game changer.
As a college student money was tight, and racing was expensive. I quickly learned that to win it’s as much about Cubic Dollars as it is about skill. My dream was to become a Open wheel road racing star with no real plan to get there.
My B was fast, and I was pretty good locally at Bridgehampton, but I wanted to race on real race tracks not against the clock. Hence, the move to Enduro karts which were races on real tracks not Go Kart tracks. The North East Div. went from New Hampshire to Southern Virginia (VIR) and west to the Pennsylvania/Ohio line.
A season was 12-13 races with each race lasting 1 hr. Back in those days we only had a single gear that we could change for each race, so racing those karts was a combination of road racing, and dirt tracking (drifting) around long corners as we had to keep up the revs. I ran my Kart for 3 years.
1st year was learning and screwing up constantly. I blew 2 engines and damaged another 3 or so. The same things always seemed to break as we didn’t had suspensions so bumps did major damage. the major lesson learned was don’t just fix it with the same parts, it has to be better. Lets just say that my girl friend who I later married father worked for Grumman’s on the LEM project. Over the winter after season 1 I brought all the parts that I broke to him, and Grummans remade them to a much higher standard or simply designed new parts. Also my best friend and team manager worked PT at Hooker Chemical Corp, so that my fuel additive which is allowed up to 10% was now formulated by them. Lets just say that it was always delivered in plain metal cans and we were told all the time not to smoke around it.
Season 2 was a coming together of a kart that could easily be the equal of any kart in the class above the one that I ran in as we ran two or three classes per race, and learning to be a complete driver no matter the weather. Won more then half of the races that year. We also had our engines completely torn down after every race so it came home in a box of parts. Didn’t really matter as we were just about the only team to do a complete rebuild especially the carb for every race.
Season 3 was a very special season. 13 races, I won 10, 1 3rd in the rain as we still ran slicks, 1 DNF as the guy I was following blew an engine and dumped oil all over the track and on me. I spun out. By the end of race 12 I had won the championship by a wide margin, and still have the plaque after all these years on my wall. I didn’t want to run the last race of the season at Thompson Conn, but I had to as my sponsor said so. Back then corner flags were hand thrown. I was so far out front I could have stopped for lunch and still won. Anyway, a corner worker forgot to change a green to a yellow flag as he went to help push off the track a kart that spun out. So I entered a very fast left hander in a controlled slide and when I saw the stalled kart it was too late. I woke up in the ambulance. By a Miracle I had survived and nothing was broken on me but everything was super sore. The kart needed a full new front end, which we had replaced over the winter.
I realized over the winter that I needed to move up or on. The accident just changed me. So that was my last race, and to this day I still regret that decision.
joel
