STARTING WITH KARTING
LOVERACING
LOVE RACING #1
STARTING
WITH
KARTING
- Nicholas Love
- January 22, 2019
…you can race more, learn what lines work and which do not, get used to braking on track, and, the best part of all, compete!
INTRODUCTION
We’ve all been there on the couch watching Ayrton Senna fly through turns, Jeff Gordon fighting to win at the last moment, or watching Jeremy Clarkson in a caravan race and we’ve all thought about how awesome it would be to do this. Well we may not all have the ability or the budget for these specific races but we can get the same feel in many other forms of racing.
THE VERY FIRST STEP
So you’ve just gotten your driver’s license and want to go racing but there is this small thing called a budget. Before you do anything else, you need to learn the fundamentals of racing and this is where literature can come in handy. There is a pretty comprehensive list of racing books organized from low to high cost and is a treasure trove of useful information (I will be sharing this list soon). Ok, you’ve done a bit of reading and understand how to take a good line and maybe some amount about passing but you have a completely stock car, hopefully a Miata, and don’t really have the skills yet to jump onto a race track. Well don’t worry, there is a form of racing for you! Kart tracks are in almost every city and provide a huge amount of fun for not a lot of money. Electric and Gas karts are the two choices in these categories.
GAS KART RACING
Many people have raced in a gas kart when they were younger and may think that these are too slow to get any experience in. Well they are definitely wrong. Most common karting tracks utilize gas karts because they have a few benefits over their electric brethren.
Typically cheaper:
This means you can race more, learn what lines work and which do not, get used to braking on track, and the best part of all, competition!
Longer run-time compared to electric:
Since gas karts are typically slower than the electric karts, it teaches you to keep your momentum up to obtain fast lap times, which is a lesson you will need later in your career/life.
ELECTRIC KART RACING
Electric karts have started to take over in popularity in larger cities with indoor facilities that you can race in year round. Anything that allows you to be able to practice your race craft more is a very useful tool. Electric karts have the advantage of instantaneous torque upon acceleration, which takes a different type of skill to drive. Driving with more power teaches you car control skills and techniques to keep your car on the fast lines. Karting is often full of very tight and technical tracks where you might encounter many combinations of the three turns shown here.