Typing this as I fly out to the States to give the kite buggy speed record a nudge. Currently it stands at 127km...which is pretty fast when your odd-fellows are a mere 3 cms off the ground! And it’s no ordinary ground either,... imagine concrete with a 40-grit sandpaper finish, YEEEOW!
There are seven of us kiwis taking on Germans, Dutch and Team America! .....But we have a secrete weapon! We have the Grand Guru; the man that invented it all, the one and only, Peter Lynn. Peter Lynn is world famous for inventing the sport of kite buggying twenty years ago and is constantly innovating for higher performance and for whackier new angles.
Peter and our team have brainstormed a new buggy design, and built a wheel testing rig to find the most efficient configuration for the resultant wind and force angles of this specific application.
The contest is at Lake Ivanpar, 60 kms south of Las Vegas. Its similar to the Bonneville salt flats, only it’s a dried up mud flat (better grip for lateral wind forces)
Discovery Channel are coming to film us and we also have a new GoPro video unit to record the on-board action. We’ll post some pics and footage here as it comes available.
You’ll recall our World Record across the Sahara Desert last year, where we were the first in the world to cross the Sahara by kite power. Check out www.madwaysouth.com We broke records and I broke bones when I smashed into a rock at speed!
This time I’ll be a bit more careful, there shouldn’t be any rocks, and if we do roll our rig, riders are strapped securely under a roll cage.
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