We’ve been racing for about 10 races... 14 year old kid that’s a total gear head. He lives at the dirt tracks in our area. However, he’s a little too conservative as a driver. He often cleanly races to the front just to be bullied by the fast kid that spins nightly and pushes kids out of their way.
My comments are “go faster so he can’t touch you”. We need a little more speed and I’m not considering motor.
We got our feet wet on a 1/10th mile dry slick short track. The help I received there was paramount. My guy had us on 2psi/3psi. To me that is crazy but I went with it. Now, we’ve moved up to a 1/7th mile dry slick track. Fundamentally I can’t run 2/3psi. I’ve bumped it from 3/4 then bumped it to 3.4/4.4. The kart looks like it’s on asphalt. He turns, it bites and it goes wherever he wants to put it. However, he simply doesn’t look as fast as the other karts. He regularly turns lap times faster than what the winners are turning.
Then we went to practice at a brand new track. We spent a lot of time at practice. **note** we only have three sets of tires. One 2016 practice set and two 2019 race sets. (I didn’t want to destroy new tires learning resurfacing, stagger, psi, prep etc so we’ve only used three sets10-12 races). At the new track we ran the practice set and lap times 16.5ish, 2nd attempt we ran with better tires with better stagger dropped times down to 16.2ish. Third attempt same results.... 4th attempt we use the same set of tires that we ran 16.5’s with. He goes out against adults and runs a four lap average of 15.5.
I always check psi after a run. His RF was 15.6 psi. I didn’t walk the psi down on that tire by mistake. He was against adults running 15.6psi which probably put his RF stagger around 1.7
This got me to thinking that I need to find the sweet spot on PSI. I know we’ve been low for the 1/7th mile. We last raced at 3.4/4.4. I think I can possibly bump each tire 1.5 and still not be there.
**note** I have four new sets of Burris 33’s ready to go. But, I don’t want to use them until I get this figured out. I’m assuming they will need a slightly different psi.