NEW MEMBER

    A new PAL member this week as Dirk Wegener from the Netherlands, a former webmaster of the old SMK Time Trials page from 1996 and webmaster of http://www.supermariokart.nl joins SMK Time Trials! Dirk enters the PAL Players' List at #76 and #12 in the Netherlands. His PAL Overall standard is Pro E! Weclome to the site Dirk!

U.K KARTERS MEETING

    There was a small karters meeting last Friday evening! We didn't kart because it was actually a night out! We all met up in the Litten Tree in Croydon, South London with a load of other non-karters that some of us knew. We weren't able to get many karters to come but it was good fun in the end. Those karters present were Sami Çetin, Matthew McCarthy, John Barber and Andrew Hewlett. We all had photographs taken, so provided those come out you'll get to see them. On our way out we also managed to have a short meeting with Esra Kennedy, but no more photos at that time. It was a good laugh anyway, and we will try to meet again soon.

PR UPDATES

    It was a quiet week for the first half but then some karters picked up their controllers and got karting! NTSC World Champion, Jamie White chipped off a bit off his VL1 lap to 0'09"55! Hue Le karted his favourite Ghost Valley 2 again to cut it down a little more. Our recently joined NTSC member, Blaise Ratté karted a fair bit and with his PRs including a GOD time on GV2 lap climbed up to Elite C overall standard, #49 on the NTSC Players' List and #14 in Canada!

    On PAL we had some great activity from the British karters; John Barber who joined the site recently has already been hitting some records. He is well on the way to reaching Expert F, some more small improvements should get him there. He did however pass two karters on the list (Jan Beier and Christophe Ley) for #93 on PAL. The U.K's 2nd fastest karter, Matthew McCarthy had a great week with his lap records. A few GOD times were hit, and his Bowser Castle 1 is looking great too. He has climbed to Legend D overall standard with his improvements. Gavin Ward improved his Mario Circuit 1 time a little this week.

    Other active karters were Julien Patry from France who has continued his improvements after last week's success! His long list of PRs helped him to Elite A overall standard, he will be reaching the Kings soon. Thorsten Fellberg of Germany returned to SMK by improving his BC3 5-lap time a little. Hopefully we'll see some great times from him soon and maybe a climb into the Legends.

NEW MEMBERS

    A new PAL member and a new NTSC member joined the SMK site this week!

    On PAL we have Karel van Duijvenboden from the Netherlands who has sent in all times with D.K.Jr to earn him a #60 placing on the PAL World Rankings with an Elite F overall standard.

    Secondly on NTSC, Dean Barnhart from U.S.A joins after getting all of his times together. Some solid Mushroom cup times so far, we'll probably see him improve the others quickly soon. He enters the NTSC list at #90 with an Intermediate C overall standard.

BRITISH KARTERS MEETING PHOTOS ADDED

    Yep, the photos from that night out last weekend came out quick. 2 photos have been added to the top of the gallery featuring U.K Karters Matthew McCarthy, Sami Çetin, Andrew Hewlett and John Barber. Several were taken luckily so we were able to select the best ones, because Hewlett managed to ruin a few, lol! I have many other pics of other friends and stuff too, a few are funny, if you wanna see any more, find me on AIM and i might show you a few. :)

    On another note, the photo gallery will be having a bit of refurbishment soon, because there are too many pics on one page. Some of you may have noticed that the gallery stops working temporarily. This will be sorted out in due course. Stay tuned!

PR UPDATES

    We had one active NTSC member this week, Blaise Ratté making his week full of new PRs again! He is well on the way to reaching the Kings, and will probably be up there with Canada's top karters in the near future with the PRs he is making. He has climbed to #45 on NTSC after passing some karters and is now Elite B. Over on PAL, two of the great German karters were active! Sven Necker has been PRing all over the place again and climbed to Elite C, after passing some karters and also reaching #49 on PAL! Thorsten Fellberg has struggled a little on his return to SMK but has managed to set 4 great PRs including a nice 1'01" time for Mario Circuit 1!

    Over in the U.K, John Barber continued to PR on some courses, and cut down many points. He still has more courses left to improve with plenty of potential, so we should see him climb through the Experts fairly quickly over the next weeks. He has climbed up to Expert F on standard now, and is not far from Expert E and the next two karters above. Gavin Ward also sent in some times, which included a couple of seconds off Bowser Castle 1; he climbed to #34 on PAL with his records this week. Swiss Champion, Raphael Braun made some improvements to his CI1 and DP2 times on his return to SMK this week. The DP2s were GOD times and the CI1 a consistent Legend C. He passed Gerard Roodhorst again for #11 on PAL.

CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS TO SITE

    I have been in talks with some of the karters this week regarding certain matters that need to be dealt with. These have all come up before but because of the consequences or time or whatever we kept on delaying it till something has been done. The first matter is karters with several false records on their profiles. Back in 1997/1998 before the site was up I started collecting records of as many karters as I could from various sites to add to the site that we have today. Sadly as the N64 was out at this time and popular, it seemed that many of those active karters either pursued other interests or played newer games and many of these websites stopped working or were removed for whatever reason. So despite extensive searching we have been unable to recover all of the old pages, although we do have some.

    Years later some of the karters discovered that there were patterns to what times can be hit for 5-lap times on PAL and NTSC. This helped us to find out which times were valid and which weren't. Unfortunately, we found that the majority of the times that I added from different websites 4-5 years ago turned out to be invalid. We were not sure at the time what to do, so we just left it in the hope of some of these karters being able to either find the site, or for us to find all of the old pages to see if they had any updated times which were perhaps different to what is on the current site. Time passed and this did not work, so after some discussion with some of the karters, we have decided to remove the karters whom we never had contact with that had false times. Some karters had a few false times and have explained this and made corrections. But it looks like there will be a large number of karters that will be removed from all lists. At the moment it is 9 karters from PAL and about 25 from NTSC. We are planning to have them removed by maybe the next update. We will still keep copies of their profiles incase they ever do return with a correct list of times, we can then add them back.

    This is simply to clean up the site to make sure that from now on when we add new members we can check to see that their times are valid, and that we know that we can at least contact each one somehow if needed. There will still maybe be a few karters left with a few invalid times, but we are simply giving time for them to contact us. So what happens next? Well, after the players are removed, which some at least should be done by next week, I guess some recruiting can be done. The NTSC list will be much shorter, by about 25 karters or so. So mainly on NTSC we could use more members. The good news is that I have been speaking to Marcelo Almeida dos Reis (Mario Kart 64 champion of Brazil) and he has been in talks with some Brazilian gamers who may be interested in SMK. So hopefully in the near future we may have some new karters joining. It is up to all of you aswell to recruit new karters to the site.

Other projects:

    Following the corrections to the site we will work on other projects. The other thing that has come up is once again the standards. As time passed by many of the GOD standards seemed too easy. Again when this topic came up years ago we ended up ignoring it because of the damage it may do to any retired karters in terms of their 'achieved ranks'. But there is also this that new strats are always found and some standards will get old again over time. This problem has been seen in the past in Mario Kart 64, so standards have been left. This time we have a very high majority of karters who are happy to have standards changed. With the new boosting across grass strategies some have even requesting making separate times for sliding to get a boost across grass and the normal driving times (includes boosting on straight roads). This may complicate things a little, and plus there may be karters around the world (maybe the Japanese) whom have used boosts a lot (like in MKSC) and would have to re-do many of their times again just so that they can play the way that we want to play. The differences in the times are only minimal, and plus they are not really considered shortcut driving as they are similar to using MTs to cut grass in Mario Kart 64 which is used widely and counted as non shortcut. You are entitled to your opinion on this, so if you are around on AIM, get back to me with your ideas on this. Because changes to the standards may or may not apply to the new boosting strategies. We will not be able to make any changes very soon, but for most races some new standards can be written up. And maybe some weeks later we may have a better idea on what to do. But we would like to hear from as many of you as possible. Because with all of you karters together, putting our minds together we can make this site better.

NEW MEMBER

    One new NTSC member has joined the site this week. Aaron Miarka from U.S.A has some great skills in SMK so far as he enters the NTSC Players List at the high position of #35 with an overall standard of King E! Well done so far Aaron and keep up the great work!

PR UPDATES

    This week we had 7 active members, on PAL Karel van Duijvenboden who recently joine SMK has been enjoying hitting PRs and cut large amounts off courses like DP1 and GV3! He has some great skill indeed! Karel has climbed to Elite D on PAL with a PAL World Ranking of #53! Also on PAL, Thorsten Fellberg made some improvements to Donut Plains 2 and has cut his SR down a bit further. He is now #20 on PAL! Sven Necker has continued to PR, also on DP2 with some good cuts on his weaker VL2. This has helped him to Elite B overall standard on PAL!

    On NTSC, Jean-Sébastien Dubois returned with some King and Legend PRs that took him to King F overall standard! Juan Sebastián Arévalo also made a climb this week after 4 new GOD times. He is now Legend B overall standard on NTSC. Dean Barnhart of U.S.A who recently joined SMK has been hitting lots of records on his weaker courses. He will be passing many karters soon as he continues to improve. So far he has made it to Advanced A on NTSC. Jason Fraser improved his lap on BC1 to a Legend A time.

SITE CLEANUP SO FAR

    Well the PAL list has been sorted out, but I didn't have time for the NTSC this week so it will be done next week. Just so you know to expect the NTSC list to be much shorter when it is done. Regarding other matters, the discussion on the other site like what to do about grass boosts has taken place. The main thing was the some karters thought it ruined some of SMK's charm by using boosts to cut across grass on many of the courses, whereas others felt that a karter should be able to drive to the shortest possible Non-SC (Lap skipping or water tricking) times. Both times will be recognised, but some karters wished to have the main rankings based on normal driving, which has both its plus and minus points. Give some time to discuss this further either on the message board, yahoogroups, or perhaps to meet up on AIM.

SMK PHOTO GALLERY

    I've also been busy working on the SMK photo gallery, the navigation is a bit improved now so hopefully the site should work more because the photos are not all on one page. Check it out, and keep the pics coming in if you havent sent any yet.

4 NEW MEMBERS

    A busy week for new members this week!

    First from Scotland in the U.K we have Hugh Cox who has had a quick go on most courses since starting Time Trials and has entered the PAL List at #89 with an Expert G overall standard.

    Next we had a few karters from Australia joining the PAL lists of SMK. Andrew Pinchen has entered the PAL Rankings at #82 with a Semi-Pro F overall standard and John Neville at #94 with an Advanced C overall standard.

    Then on NTSC, entering at a very high King B overall standard, Tommy Dickinson from U.S.A enters to the NTSC Rankings at #22!

PR UPDATES

    Blaise Ratté on NTSC had a great week with some fast PRs including MC1 under 1'00"50 and some other times creeping towards Legend. He now has an overall standard of King G and is #42 on the NTSC list. Our new karter Aaron Miarka who joined in the Kings recently has attacked some of the Star cup courses hard with some superb KB1 times and other Legend records on GV3 aswell. He definitely has Legend potential and before long we may see him reach that area in the Players' List. Aaron climbed to King D overall and #34 on NTSC. Dean Barnhart has set himself some targets and is slowly working his way up there. He cut large amounts off his weaker courses and made them his stronger courses with some standards up in the Semi-Pros and Pros. He made an advancement to Semi-Pro E overall standard and #83 on NTSC this week! Colombian champion, Juan Sebastián Arévalo brought his weaker KB1 and VL1 times down that cut off a few points, then pushed his GV3 lap to a GOD time with a nice 5-lap to go with it! Juan's success brought him to Legend A overall standard at #8 on NTSC, just behind Fraser.

    Over on PAL, Dutch karter Karel van Duijvenboden continued hitting some nice PRs; working on his Elites and pushing them up to the Kings. He is now Elite C overall and nearly Elite B, with a PAL World Ranking of #50. Gavin Ward of the U.K worked again on Mario Circuit 1 and is closing in on the 1'02"00 barrier.