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This past weekend Kaleb raced in the 2nd annual Swif-tel Thunder Coke Syrup races in Brookings, SD. There were 2 separate shows on both Friday and Saturday. On Friday Kaleb raced against some of the best indoor Ju-nior 2 racers in the Mid-west. He started the 12 lap Junior 2 Light feature in the sixth position and ended up 4th at the checkered. Kaleb started third in the Junior 2 Heavy feature after finishing second in both heat races. After running third for the first 4 laps, Kaleb started to slow down and ended up in the 6th spot. The right side tires ended up getting too soft and it locked the kart down too much. We applied that valuable lesson for the next day. On Saturday they ran all the heat races in the afternoon and then at 7:00 pm they came back and ran the features in front of a nice crowd. Kaleb had 3 third’s and a second place in the four heat races. In the Junior 2 Light feature Kaleb started in the 5th spot and avoided a big crash that took out 2 karts on the first lap. After a ten minute delay to get the track cleaned up Kaleb was running third after one lap. On lap 7 he passed Nathan Skinner for second and ended up finish-ing second to Cory Talaska (who won all 4 features on the weekend). In the final feature of the weekend Kaleb started 4th and fell back to 8th after getting hung up on the outside. By the third lap he got back in the grove and passed Darrin Zomer for 6th and on the next lap he passed Dillon Sampson for 5th. Kaleb was setting up Cole Searing just as the checkered flag was waving and settled for 5th. For those who haven’t seen Coke Syrup racing before, it is high speed intense racing on a 1/10th mile track about the size of a hockey rink. Kaleb turned his fastest lap of the weekend in the final feature at 5.94 seconds.

Kaleb kicked off 2009 by heading to Kansas City, MO. to race the 1st annual Dirtzilla Nationals inside Hale Arena. On Friday Kaleb raced in the Junior 2 OHV classes. The day started off with 2 rounds of practice then each class got 5 laps of qualifying. In the Junior 2 Lite class Kaleb set the 5th quickest time out of 20 karts and he was 6th quickest in heavies. So after all karts finished qualifying then they started the features. Kaleb started fifth in the first 20 lap feature and fell back to 8th after the first few laps and was back up to fifth at the midway point and settled for a 7th place finish. The heavy feature was just getting to fire off the officials decided to postpone the feature until the next morning because of the midnight curfew. So we had to hurry back the next morning to race at 9:00 AM. Kaleb started 6th in that heavy race and obviously didn’t have a very good kart from the start as he was really loose. The caution flew on lap 12 while Kaleb was running in 8th and they stopped the field on the track. Kaleb’s motor died and we could not get it refired so he had to retire to infield.
We returned to the pit area to change motors and get ready for the Saturday show. We missed the first round of practice and struggled to find the setup early on as Kaleb qualified 19th and 14th for Saturday nights features. He started 14th in the first one as avoided some early trouble and worked his way up to 9th at the checkered. So in the second feature he started 19th and our goal was to make it to the top ten and at least get in the money. They couldn’t get this one started so they went single file and Kaleb was stuck back in 19th in the 23 kart field. If any driver went a lap down you were done for that race, so starting that far back we just wanted to stay on the lead lap. On lap 8 we were just about to go a lap down when the caution flag saved us.
On the restart Kaleb buckled down and really startedpassing karts. The longer the race went the faster he got
as he turned his fastest lap of the weekend on lap 19. At the checkered Kaleb ended up with another 9th place finish out of 23 karts.