Since my last post an entire 9 months ago many things have changed. The most glaring change is my jump from the comfort that is racing a car into the world of racing a go kart. For the uninitiated this isn’t just any go kart, it has a 125cc two stroke grand prix motorcycle engine with 6 gears powering it. Some quick math shows the engine rated at 42 horsepower and weighing at 385 lbs with me on board making for a power to weight ratio of 9.16lbs per horsepower. So in short I am racing a child’s toy that has been kitted up to run 80+ mph with my butt 2 inches from the ground and no safety belt or any sort of safety devices besides the gear I am wearing. I would love to meet the man who decided; yes what I need to do is bolt the engine from my racing motorcycle onto my son’s toy!
I initially made this jump after I had a suspension bit on my S2000 break on course while doing about 65 mph and I ended up spinning off into the grass and almost hitting a tree. So naturally I decided the best thing to do is race a kart where you have no safety equipment around you and you are going faster. Makes perfect sense, right?
One of my good friends had gotten into shifter karts a few months before me and he offered to let me race his kart at an event to see if it was really what I wanted to do. To put it mildly I fell in love. A roller coaster has got nothing on one of these little beasties. They have the power band of a crazy rabid squirrel and change direction like nothing else I have ever driven. If you just try and roll off from a stand still nothing really happens below about 8,000 rpm, then you roll over that point and it is like someone shoved a rocket up your butt and lit it. Your view goes into tunnel vision mode and all you see is what is directly in front of you. If you want to keep the engine happy you never let the revs fall below 9,000 rpm.
Needless to say I went out and bought one within 2 weeks of driving my friend’s. Now it was the end of the season so I only got two more events in but learned so much about how to drive one of these things. I was not fast by kart standards but damn if I wasn’t having fun. I studied up on these machines over the winter and came into the spring with a want to be fast which I am slowly achieving. The entire experience of racing one of these things is best described as silly. Most people think it is a cheater vehicle as it is so small but the truth is that those people are just cheating themselves out of the most fun you can have in a four wheeled vehicle.
