Ok so accelerating them into the wall it is then. Oops my foot slipped.
Here’s what I dont get about this. There is a shit ton of violence out there right now and much of humanity is pretending to be civil but are gasoline soaked rags looking for a match. Myself included.
Racing incidents are normal. Being casual with others health and property (intentional crashing, euroing) is an act of violence and will be met by some with a nuclear response. Folks who are fucking dangerous.
People are unloading full clips from their cars over stupid road rage stuff. Imagine inviting that response from someone in karting.
Sorry, I’ve been dodging hammer attacks/pushes on the NY subway for two years. It’s very much colored my understanding of violence and how folks respond. I wish I could say I was totally kidding but I’m not.
I think it’s extremely rare for a severe/violent confrontation to develop past the scales line, as that’s usually the bottleneck for the heightened emotions that may bubble up on track. Once everyone is back to their tents things generally cool off. I also think that many people DON’T go to the kart track looking for trouble, meaning they aren’t as charged to snap, nor do they have dangerous weapons (spare axles excluded) within arms reach.
I’d like to think that karting as a community can keep some of that stuff at bay. Road rage on the morning commute or the threat of a mugging in the streets is a far different environment than when you are at the race track for the purpose of indulging in a hobby you enjoy. Ultimately we are there for fun, or at least most of us are. And I think that turns things in a bit more positive direction. It’s different when a guy cuts you off in traffic and you can go ballistic on him without threat that you will ever see that guy again in your life. And you’re already mentally or emotionally compromised from the annoyance of traffic or whatever. As Evan said, yeah racing is high-stress and with the adrenalin going, people get heated and emotional and might bark or shove each other, but usually they cool down and mellow before anything wild happens.
There are brawls and fights and other wild shit, but remember you’re in a confined paddock and it’s pretty easy to have someone removed from a situation if they get too insane. Plus there are other policing factors like, people have business interests and personal relationships with others at the track, so you might catch yourself before you do something really idiotic. Karting as a community is a small microcosm. The same way most people who live in an apartment aren’t super eager to get into a full-scale nuclear neighbor war with another tenant, because you’ll have to live with that person right above/below/next to you for months, and it would just be miserable to have animosity.
I think we’re relatively safe from a real violent incident at the go-kart track.
I guess the point I wanted to make for Oliver is, assume that aggressive stuff can potentially result in unhinged responses.
Caveat emptor.
Here’s an example: (warning, disturbing)
I worry about the kids because they just don’t have the life experience to have seen the bigger picture and can be pretty casual and flippant. That can get you killed if you run into the wrong guy. I think Elias genuinely felt threatened, once last season.
I went to a kart race and a hockey game broke out?
I’m not sure which Muppet the black helmet guy is (he sounded like Kermit), but for sure the other one was Animal.
God I hate this feeling. I’ve done it a bunch and I always feel like a piece of crap when I do. Not worth it. It’s so much better passing a dude cleanly and well. Showing Respect comes back to you (and vice-versa). It’s much, much harder to salvage reputational damage than to lose it.
Swerve me, even if you don’t touch me, I’m calling your bluff and will ride with you to the yard sale if I have to. I’ll have my frame guy on the phone before we get done arguing.
I’ll add a bit more detail to this even. I’m not calling for no contact to ever be allowed in a race. I love hard racing and contact will come as a result. Send it in a little too hard on a pass and we rub wheels on accident? All good. Trying to keep on my bumper under braking and I get a little tap? As long as I’m not fully moved out of the way I can live with it.
The problem, in my eyes, is deliberate or wreckless driving to cause contact or a wreck. Lots of drivers think, or at least are being told, that they can just run into each other and nothing will happen because of the bodywork.
What’s the solution here? I’m not sure, but I don’t believe the answer is going to be getting rid of the bodywork we have now. There’s this thing called the gladiator effect, basically meaning that the more protection people have the more risks they will take. My favorite example of it is playing hockey. When I played in high school, we wore full cages (or bubbles if you were a AAA wannabe) and I saw teammates, myself included, completely sell out on the ice to block a shot. I mean full body slide, trying to get in the way as much as possible to deflect a shot if needed. Looking at Major-Junior or professional hockey, they don’t do that (as much) because they only wear visors. Even though we had safer equipment on, there wasn’t any less risk of injury because we just went out and did dumber things more often as a result. Would I look and go “we should take full cages off of high school kids playing hockey so they don’t take risks like that”? Absolutely not, in the same way I would argue that removing bodywork is not the correct call for karting.
I think we still need stronger penalties for the contact I talked about before that is the problem, and a stricter stance on it. I don’t think we should really even be handing out warnings at a national event. Drivers should already know what is and isn’t a penalty, and get called accordingly. Maybe 1 warning over a weekend is reasonable, but these are supposed to be the best drivers in the country and we don’t hold them to that standard a lot of the time. USPKS did better this weekend at it, with 3, 5, 10 position penalties and put-behind calls, but the frequency issue could probably still be improved.
This turned into more of a rant than I intended but I stand by this point.
Just wanted to say I talked to my dad yesterday and he said they handed out over 500 penalties on the weekend.
There will be further measures incoming to help alleviate the racecraft issues hopefully. USPKS isn’t happy with the driving standards either so they’re going to do more.
the thing is i had to race that way this weekend because i was throwing the 2nd punch, especially in x30 i was getting bullied quite hard because it was still only my 3rd real national.
You know what would be more impressive than throwing the second punch? Winning while not throwing any punches… The fact that you think you need to retaliate and “euro” someone shows that the mindset is completely off.
Working on that now haha. I try to do it on the Monday following each event, BUT we got caught out this week as I had to make a two day trip down to Homestead to work on some camera equipment.
Maybe smaller grids? It seems like there were 40+ karts in grid? But I guess more is better. I guess the pro grid can only be so big but senior and junior looks like it can get out of hand.
sadly that’s not how it works in jr i tried being clean at iame grands when i was front of the midfiled and i just got bullied and punted every session and at uspks i did the same back and i got moved less. no ones gonna constintly punt you if they know there gonna get it back.
