Some of the best times at CES happen after the show floor closes. Parties go on all over Vegas at various hotels and clubs, but sometimes they happen at more unusual locations too. The crew at XtremeSystems called in their friends at AMD, Intel, Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Kingston, OCZ, Corsair, Swiftech, Thermaltake, Kingpincooling, and Futuremark to put together a sweet shindig at Pole Position raceway this year–something we couldn’t pass up.
Our tame racing drivers are coming for you.
Brian, Robert, Nick and I hopped a shuttle bus to the party and were immediately greeted by throngs of our peers hanging out, enjoying crazy Bulgarian food, LN2 overclocking, and getting crazy on the race track. We headed over to talk to Charles “Fugger” Wirth and then registered to hit the track by signing our lives away and promising not to sue Pole Position if we wrecked.
The action was fast and furious. Pole Position karts use electric motors to blast around a tight indoor track with a top speed of about 45mph. They’re light, with no steering assist or suspension save for the flexible sidewalls of small rubber slick tires that try desperately to grip the polished concrete floor. The average lap is thirty seconds long, and races are 12 laps around the track. It’s intense, physically demanding, and totally rad.
When our time came, the four of us headed to the pit lane where we were given balaclavas to wear as helmet liners, and then sent off to watch a safety video. TL;DR: the video said don’t crash and don’t pretend to be Takumi or Vin Diesel. This isn’t Initial D or The Fast and the Furious. You aren’t Jeff Gordon or Lightning McQueen.
We found our helmets and karts and hit the track, promptly forgetting all they said in the video.
We hit the track one-by-one, spaced evenly about in some ill-conceived idea to keep everyone from bunching up. Almost immediately there was bumping, rubbing and spinning out as the pros cut inside lines and clipped apexes in decreasing radius chicanes. Electric karts aren’t kids stuff. The acceleration is instant and there’s no coasting. The technical track quickly separated the slow from the practiced, sadly leaving us Icrontic guys at the back of the pack.
Thermaltake’s Ramsom Koay blasted past me after I cocked up the line in a hairpin, and with the lost momentum I fell quickly behind the pace–then Brian passed me with a nasty bump.
It was on.
I hot-footed the lap through the long left sweeper, late-braking the chicane and going all out and setting my best lap time. And just like that, the checkered flag dropped and we returned to the pit lane.
Robert and Peter can't stop racing. It's addictive as hell.
Nick finished in 7th place, I came in right behind him, and Robert and Brian held down 10th and 11th places respectively. We were bottom rung scrubs, embarrassed and humiliated but optimistic that we’d improve after our first time out. Nick and Brian retired from racing to enjoy the rest of the event but Robert and I were hooked. We raced two more times that night. Robert did the best out of all the Icrontians there, pulling a sixth place finish in the second race with an average lap time of 30.11 seconds. That was just 1:33 off the fastest time. Nice work.
The LN2 was flowing, but we stayed away from the frozen condensation and e-peen. Instead, we spent our time off track watching the tight battles between the folks from XtremeSystems and TechwareLabs who consistently fought for first and second places. Additionally, we finally got to meet Alex from PetrasTechShop, Theo Valich from Bright Side of News, and we had nice chats with the folks from ASUS and Gigabyte. It was a great time. If records were broken, we didn’t know about it and we were having too much fun to care.
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