Intro: I started racing karts mid 90’s as a 5 year old, watching the Skusa pro tour and various other bigger series attend my home track, Pats Acres.
A few years ago I restored a 99 MBA Shifter chassis with the help of a few of the guys on my race team. We competed with it at the IKF Road Race Grand Nationals with it a few months ago and did rather well!
Fast forward to this kart. I was prowling craigslist and came across a deal on a mid 2000’s CRG with a rotax. I like to see what’s on the market, so I clicked the add. I noticed this Birel chassis sitting in the background, so I reached out to him to see if he’d part with it. He told me $200 and I could have it.
Within an hour I was in a rental truck (of course the one week my van is in the shop…) and headed 3 hours north to Seattle. Made great time, and picked the kart up.
From what we gather, it’s a 99 Birel shifter chassis. Ironically, I’ve got two other 99 Birel shifters in the shop being restored for a customer, so I was more then happy to take this project on.
After getting the kart home, we gave it a massive cleaning, disassembling it fully to see what needed to be fixed, repaired, or replaced.
Today we put the kart on a frame table, and it’s perfectly straight. The frame has the original powder coat, and aside from the typical rock chips, the frame has two small scratches about an inch long.
My goal with this project is to run it as a LO206 kart, as I do a ton of coaching for the Junior drivers in the area. This will allow me to do lead/follows, and work side by side with the drivers as we work on race craft, and maximizing their performance.
My hope is that this can encourage people to get out and hit the track regardless of how new their chassis, how fresh their engine is, or how many heat cycles are on the tires. Karting to me is all about the passion of driving and doing the absolute best with what you have.
Enough talking, here’s some pictures:
Uploading… Uploading…
Unfortunately I’m at a stopping point as I leave for a two week work trip (Texas Motorsports expo, and then PRI right after) but I hope to have an update mid December!