Green Light for Calgary Kart Racing Club 2021 Season
Plenty of facility upgrades over the off-season has the club excited to finally get up to speed.
By John Kwong / CKRC.
After condensing the 2020 Calgary Kart Racing Club season into the second half of the summer last year, 2021’s racing season prospects were also looking unpredictable with continued lockdowns on most activities in Alberta.
Early in May, we got the go-ahead to only run Test & Tune sessions with full-time masking at the facility but no competitive race days just in case there was an injury that needed to go to the hospital.
Despite uncertainty about the season, CKRC members were still signing up for their annual memberships and we are currently at 278 members with about 190 of those being drivers. Slowly, the restrictions were eased and eventually the CKRC was able to hold its first 2021 event on June 19/20. Even with some iffy weather forecasts and being on the Father’s Day weekend, there were 100 entries each day with many regulars still missing.
The CKRC continues to run a full complement of Briggs, Rotax, Vortex VLR classes as well as the Shifter class with almost all of them with double-digit fields. All of our regular race marshals returned to support the racers and the race day went smoothly as usual under the guidance of Fred Causer, our club manager and head race official.
During the off-season club meetings were held via Zoom and several track improvements were put into place for this new season. The scoring tower saw a drastic change with the original “crows nest” viewpoint for Fred being replaced with a 20’ sea-can with much larger windows so no driving infraction will go unnoticed.
The West paddock had the final touches done to the soil stabilization and we now have approximately 10 acres of paddock space to handle our growing membership base and to host large events. A Nest Cam has been added to the top of race control and will broadcast as CKRC LIVE to our fanbase for this season’s race events. With this increased broadcast exposure we hope to attract more sponsors of the club as well as give more value to our existing sponsors.
A new 20’x30’ garage has been built next to the PreGrid area and will be used as the pre and post technical inspection building.
With the West paddock undergoing expansion with the soil stabilization process, it allowed the club to do some re-organizing of the parking and layout of some of the infrastructure. Several sea-cans were placed to give the Try-A-Kart operation a dedicated area to maintain and store all of their equipment in one space right next to the PreGrid area so that karts and parts are near when needed.
Next on the CKRC schedule will be the first rounds of the Alberta Shoot-Out on July 3/4 and then the first annual North of 49 Karting Championships from July 22-25. Learn more on: https://ckrc.com/northof49/
