r ward

ran a kart with my son in "Stock Light" and when the "Blue Wazoom" class was popular. i designed and built his karts,....they were modeled after the "Shamrock" chassis with fully adjustable front end geometry. in my son's last two years of racing he won 23 first and/or second place trophies. in his last year, he ran the first I/2 of the season in Stock Light and the second half of the season in "Blue Wazoom" class and won track championships in both classes by the end of the season. we had to ask for permission to run Blue Wazoom class (an adult class at our track) because my son was only 15 at the time, but he wanted to go faster than Stock Lite speeds and there was no Yamaha class run at the track. we asked the track owner and the guys in Wazoom and they welcomed him in,.... so we bought a Wazoom engine and he went racing with the "big boys". I can remember hearing couple dads telling their younger sons, "go watch this race, Doug Ward (my son) is racing and watch how he runs the track"..... that made me one proud dad ! the track was a 1/8 mi. asphalt oval and 1/2 mi. road course combined. everyone ran the oval in the morning and the road course in the afternoon on spec tires so competition was close and we had to add a bunch of lead to his kart to meet the minimum weight requirement. (IIRC, I had 38 lbs of lead bolted to his chassis, to be a pound over the minimum for Blue Wazoom class !) there was always a mad rush to get his kart set up for the road course after the oval races were done, the two tracks required completely different set-ups, gearing and weight distributions.
an interesting occurrence that happened one weekend is that the owner of "Shamrock Chassis" approached me and my son and wanted us to run a Shamrock Chassis for him, but he wanted us to buy the chassis. I knew at the time that people didn't understand all the set-up details about his chassis and we did, because we had essentially the same front end as his. we couldn't come to an agreement about purchasing a chassis and I didn't feel at any disadvantage by running our own chassis, so nothing ever came of it. that was too bad, we would have happily run one of his chassis and done everything we could to promote them,.....they were a good design,..... and i'm sure my son could have put one in the winners circle, but there was no reason I should have to buy a chassis to advertise it for him. we were beating his driver out on the track, it was obvious that we knew how to setup a front end like that ,...he certainly needed someone that could do that, and I think he just wanted our home built chassis out of the picture. both my son and i were all for it, except for the purchase stipulation. it almost seemed like the guy just wasn't thinking right.