Our 2014 debut started in the same way as many of the 2013 days you have read about: woke up at 4am, couldn’t get back to sleep, left later than planned and the kart got soaked in the first 15 minutes of the journey from Bristol. You’d never have known it was so shiny only 24 hours earlier. I really need to sort some kind of cover out 🙁

Anyway, Clay was sunny 😮 but my wallet was lighter for paying for the engine rebuild, track loyalty card and practice day fee! We had to run the engine in – probably just as well given I had rebuilt the kart from the chassis last weekend but what should have been a straight-forward enough process proved not so. First I forgot to tighten the hose clip around the airbox. Then Junior complained the brakes weren’t working properly. It appeared there was air in the system – thanks, Sam! (you need to put some content on your homepage by the way 😉 ). Then Junior complained his brakes weren’t working (sensing a theme?) – the axle had shifted although the tape around them had saved the grub screws. I’d been wondering for a while now whether taping the grub screws was a good thing – you cannot see if and when they are loose. So I tightened them and left the tape off. Then Junior complained the brakes weren’t working – this time he was properly p*ssed because his good friend (also a novice but less experienced) had overtaken him!!! Would you believe it if I told you we had NO GRUB SCREWS!?! It seems my new grub screws had been scattered around Clay – I am fully expecting to harvest a nice crop there later in the summer 😉

So, with shop-fresh grubs screws, loctite and plastic ties, Junior managed to get his head down and drive a kart with fully functional brakes 🙂 He had also complained the kart wasn’t picking up out of the corners – replacing the carb (the one we’d run the back end of the season with and the only one not to have been rebuilt) with a fresh one cured that ail. It is good to see that Junior is starting to feel the kart and know when things are wrong – he is almost always right. We’d written off the morning but at least the ‘running in’ was done and we could see where we were. It turned out pretty well – Junior was consistent (in his missing of the apexes by about a foot in addition to his times!) but we seemed less than a second off of the pace and his lines were decent when he nailed them. Junior’s shoulder injury was ok but that also meant I didn’t get to go out on track :/

And the kart stayed dry the whole way home!

Cost of day: £16 petrol, £7 fuel for the kart, £30 practice fee, £40 loyalty card, £4 three grubs screws(!)

Total spent this year: £742

Year 1 spend: £4,594