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Formula Vee Racing Tasmania |
About "Silky Performance"
Evan Lyons
DOB: 27/11/59
Height: 183cm
Weight: 82kg
 Kestrel KC-3 1200cc All modifications and tuning by Evan (Silky Performance) Crewed by Josh "Spankie" Kingston and Adam "Noodle" Oakley. Thanks to Tiger Towing and Tas. Sport Images. Special Thanks to Nino, Vince, Alfonse and the rest of the crew at Bocchino Motors in Hobart |
Eastern Creek 2004 |
My first motorsport was racing Moto-x bikes way back in the early '70's. I started on old Yamaha 100 and 125cc bikes. I ended up settling into open (500cc) class and competed successfully for quite a few years. A serious accident in the late '70's in one of the famous old "BP" desert rallies near Mildurah in Victoria result in a broken right lower leg and complications kept me too close to death for comfort for some weeks in intensive care with a fat clot.
Drifted away from bikes and onto sprintkarts in the early '80's in "Clubman Heavy" class sprintkarts. Getting sick of the crash, bash and inflated ego's in "Clubman Fat" I moved in to 100cc Reed class for a few years. Unfortunately, due to my size(6ft) and weight (85kg) and restrictive class weights, I was not very successful in Reed, so I moved on to 135cc Super.
I had been getting interested in superkarts for quite a while and eventually constructed my own first kart. It was an old Clubman Twin class frame with an old air cooled Suzuki RM125! The air cooled motor soon went in favour of a later and wildly tuned water cooled RM125 and this combination served me well for a couple of seasons but the bug had bitten hard and I found a '92 model Honda RS125 GP bike engine to play with! This went into a lightweight Techno 135 Super chassis and ran faultlessly for years. I still have that kart!
Later on, I moved into a F250E superkart (#71) which was a British made Zip Eagle chassis powered by a Honda RS250 GP race bike engine. That thing was fearsomely fast and was difficult to handle around the tight and bumpy Baskerville layout weighing 225 kilos and with about 85 BHP available @12500rpm. Was quite a thrill at Symmons Plains!
I regularly took the thing to Phillip Is and Eastern Creek on the mainland
I have done a best time around Baskerville of 51.16 in that 250cc superkart, making me (unofficially) the fastest Tasmanian around Baskerville in a superkart!
More recently, the move into the immensely popular category of Formula Vee racing due to the fact that there is precious little superkart racing down here in Tasmania now.
I started in an old Historic 1969 Elfin Formula Vee and I now have a 1989 Kestrel KC3-1 F-Vee.
The Australian Superkarting and subsequently the Tasmanian Formula Vee Racing websites originally began as a simple homepage that just grew and kept growing.
Previous to building the original superkarting site and subsequently the Formula Vee Racing Tasmania site, I had absolutely no experience in I.T. or in fact, had ever really sat behind a computer other than to play patience and other card games!
A nasty work injury and subsequent surgery had forced me to spent many boring hours doing very little at home and a mate of mine, feeling sorry for me, loaned me an old laptop and I got internet access and my very steep I.T. learning curve began.
My friend next door had been building websites for quite some time and I thought I'd give it a bit of a tilt and my first site attempt made it onto the web in late 2000. The site became the mouthpiece for the Tasmanian Superkart Club and after some time I decided to expand the site to include pages dedicated to superkart info from all states in Australia. Over time, the site has grown to its present size and has really grown a life of its own now.
I hope that the Formula Vee Racing Tasmania site performs as well as the Australian Superkarting site.
Evan Lyons
