Saturday
The entire night, Friday, and all Saturday morning I listened to it rain. Rain rain rain. Sleep for 2 hours. Rain rain rain. Repeat. Normally this would be a good thing in the land of draught and water restrictions but my own selfish interests wanted to go go-karting on Saturday morning. Which happened to take place outside. Where is was raining. Now normally being a speed whore alone would be enough to justify wanting to go karting but there was an even better reason today. Erik and Michelle were getting engaged and it was Erik's birthday which meant it was all the more reason for everyone to get together and race karts, eat some food and enjoy the weekend.
Now we're supposed to leave about 11:30am and it's about 10am when I get an updated Evite that says we're moving the karting indoors! Sweet. Now I have a real reason to wake up the wifey and the dog and get ready. By 11:45 we're out the door with no idea how to get there other than it's at 70 and Colorado. Luckily the computer's battery decides to die leaving us with no mapquest on the screen. We drive there, just as lost as Steve and Keith and exchange cell phone calls explaining where we went that the karting place was not. Eventually I get ahold of Michelle who tells me how to find it and a minute later we're there.
Now we hadn't been karting in a while and Marni has improved her driving considerably since our last outing thanks to our autoX adventures. We're all helmeted up and ready to go. After the first round I'm about .75 second behind the current FTD (fastest of the day) in our group and Marni is less than a second off of me. We discuss our lines a bunch and pay for the next session. While we wait for the others to go I decide to take a bunch of pictures with Marni's new D70. Although 90% of them were crap, a couple turned out sweet and I got to watch Steve, Keith and Mike battle it out during their session including Steve and Keith getting black flagged for blocking and passing in corners. Haha. On our last session I improve another .7 seconds while Marni speeds up to 20.73, faster than my first session time by almost .2 seconds. She ended up beating a ton of people and instead of being last like the previous outing, she was solidly mid pack. After karting we went to lunch with everyone and got to see Michelle's new ring. They both looked very happy and I can't wait for the wedding.
Sunday
Sunday morning bright and early brought our 2nd autoX in the Colt, aka Snork. This time we had the Azenis on it but it was still basically stock. Steve met us over at our apartment and we headed to the DIA lot just after 7am. We met Mike and Jon there and got the car all ready. Then we hurried through a couple course walks and headed back to the cars. We were all running in heat 3 which meant we were working heat 1. Just before it was time to head to our work assignments we figured out where Steve's wheel issue was that he discovered last night. The lower control arm was missing a bolt(!) and the back of the arm was moving all over in the bushing. Steve, Jon and Marni had to get to their corner to work so Mike and I tracked down a big bolt from the rear seatbelts and got the car fixed up. Good thing we were able to fix it as it was not safe at all to drive, much less race. Heat one went quickly as Mike and I fixed the car and at the end of the heat I went do to my work assignment which was cone audit. While it's an important job you have to do it after they heat which means you are working right before the heat you run in. I hurried as fast as I could while Marni finished getting the car ready. I got done just in time to head out on course. As rushed as I was, things only got worse as I hit the first left hander. The car cut out completely. We were way too low on gas and the g forces from the turn pulled all the fuel away from the pickup. I got the car going again and finished my lap with a DNF after missing the last slalom. In the hot pits I ran around trying to find some more gas while Marni got ready to drive. Luckily Jon had 2 cans of 103 unleaded so I threw one can in and we headed out again for Marni's run. In all the rushing around she missed a turn right at the start and DNF'd her first run too. We got back to the pits and got settled down and our 2 runs each went better. We both were clean our last run and improved our times despite the car starting to cut out again. Next time i'm going to make sure there is at least half a tank in there. I went for a ride with Steve after our runs were over and he did really well. His last run was his fastest but he coned so it was a bit higher than before. Jon was the fastest out of our group for the day but everyone had a kick ass time and are all planning to be ready for the next one on Saturday June 18. Marni and I both improved a lot with me finishing 18/26 in street modifed where we are horribly under modded for. We both picked up over 50 points on PAX too which is awesome. We also beat a couple WRX's, and EVO and a few other nice cars. Not bad for the $500 1989 Colt. Here are a couple closing pictures. Maybe i'll have the suspension done this season so we don't 2 wheel anymore?
Steve
Marni
Chris
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