Swift/PPK Behind Kart Effort

With 4 weeks to go before opening weekend in the IKF/SWRA's 2007 Road Race Karting Season, Team Principles Colin Walker (Swiftboy Racing) and Frank Newsom (Precision Performance Karting) combine their resources to move forward, and you're humble blogger will tag along the team's heels.

Texas World Speedway is the first stop on the list with a race weekend beginning on March 23. Topics around the Birel are engine work, a new pipe and header pipe, and tires.

The engine work is done by Frank at his shop, while he and/or Colin will provide the pipe combination for this track. It will be a part I am purchasing and hopefully use again after this race meeting. Some tracks call for special pipes, although, and again this is my first season in road racing, this pipe/header combination may be used again this year at other tracks. Bottom line, I have no idea. Good thing for Swift/PPK!!

We should be ratio-scaling the kart soon, along with the team's karts, driven by several young men I'll report on in this column. The chassis the team uses are Fullerton's, while mine is an Italian-made Birel. The motors are all Yamaha KT100's and the tires are by choice, all Maxxis.

The clutch set-up is new to me, so I'll be learning more about it soon and reporting on it in upcoming posts.

Here are some pics from around the U.S.

-Katykarter