The Robo Pong 200 presented by Bridgestone is scheduled for Oct 10^th. For those of you not familiar with the race, it is a 200 mile endurance kart race at Mark Dismore’s fabulous facility in New Castle, Indiana. I have been around the sport since 1970 and have participated in a lot of great events. Sitting on the grid at a packed Milwaukee Mile is cool! Places like Trenton, Pocono and the Night Before the 500 at IRP all hold special meaning to me but this event is right up there in the cool factor.

Maybe it means more with my son racing or the fact that Mark is working so hard to make this the Indianapolis 500 of karting and I wish him success but the atmosphere is tremendous. Two years ago, he had Mary Hulman George giving the command to start engine. Winners include Dan Weldon, Ricky Rudd and Ed Carpenter. The karts are TaG karts which Mark Dismore has termed possible the most physically demanding race cars he has ever drive.

Why bring this race up here and now? Frankly with the economy hurting, entries have suffered and I would like to encourage any kart team to enter. But I would also like to appeal to the other racers out there to consider putting a team together. It isn’t too late! We have a lot of formula drivers either transitioning from karts into formula cars or from formula cars to karts. The path seems to go both ways. The up side is that for around $4k, you can arrange a ride for you and a teammate. The winner makes $5,000 so you might make a profit! Ok, that might be a stretch but you are going to budget about that amount for an SCCA Pro race of any kind. Here, you get to race against at least a dozen Indy car drivers, an experience you may never get any where else!