The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

My son was the passenger in his truck the day I discovered that it topped out at 100. It had plenty of muscle getting there, but the computer shuts it all down once you're there. In fact, it keeps it shut down, no matter how much you slow down, until you lift the loud pedal at least a little bit.

He's ridden with me on the track in the Mustang but never at full speed. Maybe an 80% pace. And he used to go to Malibu Grand Prix with me all the time back when we had one in KC. In fact, he was the second-youngest person to ever qualify for the "Club Car" license there. The Club Car is a fire-breathing version of their regular cars and with stickier tires. You have to run two back to back observed laps at a pace unobtainable by most drivers before you get your license for that one. In all the many years the KC MGP was around, we got our Club Car licenses months before it closed and mine was number 35 and my son's was 36.

Anyway, because my son (and my daughter, too, to an even greater extent now) was brought up on speed, he actually drives pretty conservatively on the road. I'm hoping he asks to share the Mustang with me sometime at an open-track event, possibly with me as his Instructor. But I'm not offering until he asks. <g> He already handles most of the maintenance/repairs when I'm at the track.

Getting back to the Malibu Grand Prix, there was a "Who's the Fastest in KC" competition there a few weeks before they closed. I came in second place. First place (by 2 hundredths of a second with both our lap-times in the 50.7 area -- you have to be able to do clean 51.99's to qualify for the club car) was a kid named Bob Zimmerman. Imagine the confusion on the tote-board. He won $500 in free lap tickets and I won $250 in tickets, so we became good friends over the next several weeks as we used up our tickets (and then some). It was then that I found out he was an icon at that MGP. Why? Because he was the youngest to ever qualify for the club car.

Whenever I had consulting gigs in Overland Park, I would spend my lunchtimes up there wolfing down a sandwich real quick and getting in as many laps as I could in an hour. If I was near MGP, I was doing laps. I kept my own helmet and gloves in the car for that very reason. I was literally spending hundreds of dollars a week there. One of the few people who would buy tickets 100 at a time (because they were $1.40 each in hundred-lots but $2.50 each in smaller increments).

The day they shut down was a very sad one for me. It was an important part of my life and my family also loved it. Personally, I felt they weren't managed well enough to optimize income, but their problems likely went beyond that, as evidenced by their stock's activity (MBEW.OB).

I had numerous conversations with the regional veep and it looked like a strong possibility I'd be partnering with them to open another track, but that fell apart as the company's retrenchment worsened. To this day, if I had the funding, I'd rather run a go-kart track than do anything else. Especially now that KC has become dramatically more racing-inclined.

Zimmerman and I both showed up the day they closed and they kept the track open for us long after they closed for normal business that night. We stayed until 1 in the morning thrashing the Club Car for the last time before it was dismantled and the parts shipped to other tracks.

I've got a dirt track here with old MGP tires at all the turns and my office and basement are filled with memorabilia from them. They let us take our pick of the pictures and other things on the wall.

In fact, my paperweight is the steering wheel hub from that Club Car.

Maybe one of these days, I'll open my own go-kart track. It'd be awfully expensive to do it the way MGP does, though. They're not karts. Far more aggressive than what most people think of when they think of karts. And probably too intimidating for the general public.

Lordy, I miss MGP.

Getting back to kids and speed, I bought myself a Manco Dingo kart a couple of years ago. The one with the electric-start 13-horse Honda engine. An extremely aggressive off-road kart. We haven't measured top speed on it yet, but I suspect it's a bit north of 50-mph. My 4-wheeler tops out at 42 and my daughter runs away from me when she's in the kart. Yep. My daughter. 12 years old and driving that thing like crazy both on our gravel roads and on our track (a half-mile road-course layout) and on a neighbor's oval track. It's become "hers".

She's very much into driving or riding at speed. But I've made sure she understands how to do it. It's not every daddy who hears his 12-year old daughter tell him through his in-helmet radio "You're going to catch a black M3 in 3 laps -- he doesn't understand the 8-9 kink and you should take him there." Or who keeps telling me she wishes we had a 2-seat kart so I could show her the correct line from the driver's vantage-point through some of the more technical turns on our track.

For this family, fast driving is one of our real strong bonds. But we emphasize doing it safely and appropriately. To this day, my daughter and I still race to see who gets their seat-belt "clicked" first. Been playing that game forever.

http://www.sound.net/~bytor/zcar2.jpg (my daughter 5 years ago)
http://www.sound.net/~bytor/bobz1.jpg (daddy having some fun)
http://www.sibob.com/manco1.jpg ("her" kart)