I love to fire up my computer first thing in the morning and see what is new in the world of mini z’s. My home page quickly loads to minizracer.com. Here I get to share my passion with other Z enthusiasts and read informative posts. It also gives me the opportunity to read about other clubs. Speaking of clubs, our local mini z club is the subject of today’s post.

Our club consists of loyal die hard mini z enthusiasts. We race every Wednesday night at the Kenzo Arena. A beautiful indoor non profit carpet track owned by one of our members Ken Bartuccio. We have a KO Propo system hooked into a Compaq laptop computer. It works well with the aid of the lap counting program autoscore. We currently race for points and are gearing up for our year end banquet complete with highlight footage of past races, photos, awards and of course dinner. Wife’s and girlfriends have been encouraged to attend in a way to justify all of the years previous mini expenditures. At our club family is always welcome. We have a small fridge that is set up for nice ice cold drinks and we always manage to order tacos or pizza. Food is a necessity when racing mini z’s.

As you might expect our club members are highly competitive. We all have state of the art equipment consisting of Hudy tire truers, Team Orion motor checkers, Tamiya Dyno’s, Digital power supplies and a host of tools, sprays, chargers and other peripherals. We even have one member who designed his own vacuum forming machine and makes his own very detailed bodies from scratch. Another member is expert at soldering fets and takes care of everyone in the club, what a guy! A close friend of mine actually came out with his own line of tires that work great on any surface and sells them under the name Max Traction.

The track itself is carpet with PVC pipe as the barriers. To overcome cars, especially F1’s getting stuck under the pipe, Ross and Ken Bartuccio came up with a system of lining the pipe with a plastic material that repels your car and keeps you in the thick of things instead of coming to a dead stop. It is a rather large track 27ft long by 12ft wide. We run Modified; Pro Modified which consists of FET upgraded 02’s and mod F1 classes. Racing is extremely close and competitive. This week the guys to beat were Jim Cukla in F1, Stefan Loeffler in Pro Mod and Jeff Maturo in Mod.

True to form, Stefan Loeffler managed to dominate Pro Mod and surprisingly, won F1 as well. I would attribute his win in F1 to Jeff Maturo having technical difficulties. Jim Cukla, although he placed third seemed somewhat tired and frustrated from a night of burnt FET chips on not one but two of his cars, a 02 and F1. Poor Jimmy! Mod was owned by Jeff Maturo as he remains unbeaten in 6 weeks. Wow he is one of my favorite racers. Nice job Jeffro!

The night ended with all of the racers mulling over what to do about the kyosho chips burning up. Hopefully we will have a fantastic solution to share, until next race, I am Jeff Maturo.