I managed to shoe-horn the Chonda engine into the frame. We used a 1-1/2" offset mount. It kept it away from the seat, but as you can see it required quite a cobbling of the bodywork to clear the fan cover.
We did our first laps on the track today - her 8th birthday. It was a blast as Marcia, Ashley and I were all able to run together. Of course, Ashley smoked us any place she wanted to. Without any weight and with no restrictors that little four-stroke has an amazing amount of torque coming out of the turns. With no chassis set-up or gearing optimization and on a rock-hard set of ancient MOJO's she was turning pretty easy 49.5's The motor topped out at about the start-finish line at 5950 RPM, so there was a lot more speed in the kart with a lower than the 59 tooth gear I had on there. I trapped her at 43 miles per hour at the end of the straight - but she hit that speed as I said, right at the stripe and it peaked and held. The fact that the Micro Max hits 57 miles per hour on that same straight, with not a much faster lap time (for Ashley low 46's) shows how much that low end torque pulls these light karts out of the turns.
It'll be a few weeks before we get back out on the track and then I'd like to optimize the kart to see just what kind of time a cadet will turn (a 900 or 950mm chassis would probably be an even quicker set-up). Once we dial in the best lap times, we'll start restricting things back to get to 50-51 second circuits to be consistent with the big runners. We'll work up the rules to ensure as level a playing field we can.
The track was not too bad today, as I was clicking off consistent 51.9's - so if anything it was only a 1/2 second off prime racing.
This really looks to be a nice stepping stone between kid-karts and the faster cadet action. Plus, if our other young racers are anything like Ashley we should have some pretty big fields out there with a number of driver's double-stinting the weekends.
