So on Saturday, we headed up to Chicago Indoor Racing for our friend Tim's bachelor party, and had an absolute blast. After you check in and watch a safety video, it's off to the change rooms to put on your fire suit, head sock, helmet, and neck brace, then you're in a go-kart that's able to do 30-35 mph without much difficulty. The package we had gave us three heats (and we had enough people that we did this in two different run groups) of 15 laps each, then the top 9 drivers were given a final heat of 30 laps to determine the winner. The steering on the karts is extremely stiff; by the end of the night, most of us were complaining about arm and shoulder soreness, and some of our less-beefy friends were having pretty serious problems by the end of their last heat. Note to self: build a bit of upper-body strength before going back out there. And we will be going back out there. :-)
Afterwards, we all headed over to Albert's place and relaxed for a bit, and we got to see the latest progress on his car. The AWD conversion is pretty much done, and he's done a dead-sexy job on both the new fuel cell setup and the new 10-point cage. With the turbo he's going with, and his current plans for the year, he's going to be breaking drivetrain components, no question about it, but he's going to have a hell of a lot of fun. :-) (Albert, if you're reading this, I WANT YOUR FUEL CELL SETUP. Damn, that's nice. And beats the hell out of what I'm going to end up fabricating to make my in-tank setup work...)