I am 53. This year I came back to kart racing after years in cars. I usually ran Masters class this year, which was only 10 pounds more than Senior, so not much slower. Twice I ran in Masters and Senior, so with the kids. I set sprocket to be ideal for Master because it was main class and adjusted weight between runs.
So to borrow a phrase. Just do it!
I ran one or two senior races. The competition is better and the fields are bigger. I suspect for most middle aged men the issue is just making weight. There is also the fact that masters fields tend to send it less!
I was one of those people that could not make weight. I could not make it for Masters either. So I went on diet and lost 45 pounds. Now I have to add 15 for Masters and 25 when I run Senior. Lucky for me Masters locally have good numbers. We averaged 15 and had a high of 28
A lot of this is what everyone else already says. I will add, I’ve seen Masters drivers hop in Senior and hand it to the kids sometimes. It’s not terribly common, but I’ve seen it happen.
I’ve noticed there’s also a big gap from about when someone turns 20 (aka me) until late 20’s when things generally start to get where they can manage to get on track a bit more often. I’ve been trying to avoid that but haven’t had a lot of success staying 18 at this point.
If you want to though, go ahead and enter the senior races. Honestly those can be cleaner than Masters sometimes.
Regarding parents, I can’t stand some of the parents that will throw themselves in front of their child the moment something happens. The parents that don’t allow anyone to get near their kid when the driver makes some stupid move on track and the driver taken out wants to have even just a discussion with the kid. I haven’t had that issue myself, but I’ve seen ot happen a few times in Seniors.
I was thinking the same thing Dom. I’ve seen it first hand, younger drivers don’t usually have that little voice telling them “you have to go to work tomorrow”, they live in the moment without much regard for life after the race. Now, I have seen some older drivers like that too, but typically, as we age the definition of “send it” changes. For the most part I would rather race with like minded people that aren’t going to make moves that have no chance of working.
Man, I wish I could come in here and add something insightful, but it’s pretty much been added already.
When you’re having to fund the racing yourself, you start to see a different type of racer appear. I’ve done a few podcasts talking about the importance about figuring out how to support your racing career, when mom and dad stop.
Granted, I started racing when I was in my early 20s, so I’ve never had that experience (at least with racing. My parents spoiled me in other ways.)
Now as an older driver (cries) myself, I find myself balance out more of my adult responsibilities with racing, and also trying to find new places that I want to go racing.
Winning a regional title is on my bucket list, but at the same time, I want to travel to different tracks and see other places.
Racing with other Masters is also a nice thing, because we all have to go to work on Monday, so there are less “Mclaren will call me after this race” divebombs than what I experienced racing in Senior.
Also, I’m a little taller as a karter, and so I don’t want to lose a serious amount of weight, just for karting, since I like my body size (mostly.)
I sure do not “hand it to the kids”. In one of the Senior races I ran I finished about mid-pack after a good battle with another driver. It was fun to see the look on the 17 or 18 year old on the way to the scales when he saw I was some gray hair “old guy”. As some commercial used to say. Priceless
Yeah it always makes me laugh. I had a good rental battle once with a 17 yo kid half my size and weight, full of himself. When we looked at the timing boards (I’d whooped his ass 
) he looked me up n down n said how is it possible 
I agree with so much that has already been said, but here goes my $0.02. I will never likely be able to make senior weight. I just turned 45 this year, am 6’9" and currently weigh around 205 lbs. That is after loosing 15 lbs. With no lead my kart and I scale in around 405 lbs. Because of my build, I will never be able to lose more that another 5 to 10 pounds without looking anorexic.
Running TaG at our local clubs, the highest weight for a given engine in senior is Rotax Evo at 400 lbs. For my engine, the MY-09 Leopard its 360 lbs in the senior class and 390 lbs for masters. Some of the difference is in package weight and some in horsepower/power band. Because TaG numbers are pretty soft these days, I usually end up running senior to to have someone to race against. My current goal is to upgrade chassis to a newer year model and replace the engine with something more suited for my weight allowance (X30 or Rok). Unfortunately neither will put me in range of the senior class, so if you can make the weight I say go for it!
I grew up around auto racing. It goes back generations on my father’s side. At the time, drivers under 18 were not allowed to participate due to insurance regulations. Had I known about Karting, I would have likely made a push for it. As it was, I was just biding my time before I could get behind the wheel. Then Life happens. Go to college, work 3 jobs to pay for it and any free time was spent chasing the fairer sex or partying with the boys. After college, you start working and your priorities shift to more expensive things like marriage, car notes and mortgage payments. Throw on top of that working 80 hours a week to pay for it all. Weekend? What’s that? As the years go by the opportunity to go racing seems to slip further and further away.
Fast forward 20 years, on my second wife, first child and still have the bug to go racing. I guess its just in my blood. After visiting a few local rental kart tracks, I discover proper karting. So now I have the means, but still short on time to go race. Unfortunately the business I’m in, weekends are mandatory. The rare time I get one off I try to schedule it around available races when possible. It doesn’t make for a lot of seat time, but it definitely fills the void. I am also not the 185 lbs bean pole I was after high school, so I have to make do with what I have.
I think for many of us, the mid 30’s are a time of building lives. Its not that we don’t want to go racing, its just that other priorities prevent us from it. Maybe that’s why the “Mid-Life Crisis” exists at all. Its just the moment in our lives where we have enough of a base established to get back to the dreams and aspirations of our youth. In this manor, I whole heartedly embrace it!! I will never be a Michael Schumacher or Max Verstappen, but who cares. Send it does not always mean you have to dive bomb every corner. It can also mean showing up and putting in your best effort against the competition, whomever that might be. Just get out there and have fun!!!
I think if you kart, mid-life crisis happens and you don’t notice. Everyone else does, but you don’t. Having too much fun to call it that, but re-inventing yourself as a racer in your 40s does seem to qualify.
My problem has always been making weight, honestly no reason to run senior if you can’t make weight.
One thing that hasn’t really been brought up in this thread is that kart racing isn’t really promoted towards adults, largely 1) due to the stepping stone narrative that so many push that “the only way to go racing is through to cars”, but also 2) because most karting programs, clubs etc., don’t showcase adults racing.
To Greg’s point, if you’re a “normal adult” building your lives through your 30s, by the time that you start racing, you’re going to want to race with people who are in your peer group, not against the children of your peers.
Typically, you’ll find more adults club car racing in your SCCA, NASA, now Gridlife type series or motorcycle racing, because there are people that are in their age group there to get advice and learn from. Even adult professional racers rarely talk about karting as a thing they do, so they don’t motivate adults to seek the sport out as drivers themselves.
Also, you rarely see adults creating social media about karting themselves, so their friends rarely see them do it and aren’t encouraged to join. Everyone is waiting for someone else to create the media.
Since karting doesn’t really encourage the 30+ racer globally, it’s no surprise that you rarely see them outside of the hardcore racers, or ones that just say “sod it” and do it anyway.
Really agree with what you said Davin, but I also noticed that even with teens and young adults, karting is really commonly or widely not seen as a serious thing. Whenever I have mentioned karting to my friends, they always assume I’m talking about the rental ones. Not saying those are bad, in fact they’re really really fun, but what I’m saying is that people just don’t know much about karting at all.
Besides seeing karting as a pathway to F1, people usually see karting just as an activity for fun and not something competitive that you commit to for a season. It’s just not promoted as much as it should, especially in the United States. I remember just last year I never cared for karting and saw it just as a pathway into pro motorsports. Until I started researching about it a few months ago and actually began to really respect it and now I really love it.
Plus as an adult, while juggling with family, work, and daily life, it’s hard to get introduced to karting by yourself if karting isn’t properly promoted. Karting isn’t the most simple sport to get into either, and trying to do it by yourself may seem overwhelming. But it is also great to see more people getting into karting, which can hopefully influence more kids, teens, and adults to get the racing bug.
Tell you what I find when I talk about karting with my peers. Unless they know, the image conjured up is of a kids go-kart. The number of times I talk to my gym bunny buddies ‘what do you do for exercise?’ ‘Karting’ ‘(sniggers) that’s playing not exercise’
I’ve invited a couple of them to come do some laps then they’re like holy shit balls!!! That’s tough!
Point is as mentioned karting isn’t really promoted to any folks outside of the karting scene already.
The perennial problem world over.
Part of the issue is those who promote the sport rarely are in a position to benefit financially from it. Not that money should be the motivator, but kart promotion, done properly at least, is an expensive business. This website for example isn’t free. It takes time and effort. The videos I wanted to do this year would have costed me several thousand dollars.
it’s why letting this ‘ladder to F1’ thing mutate into the monster it is has become such a factor. It costs karting teams, tracks, and series nothing. All the F1 broadcasters and drivers pump out the message on a weekly basis. we will keep sucking on that till it runs dry. It’s millions of dollars of free advertisement. Well it’s not totally free there is a price to pay. That price being that WE don’t control the narrative being pumped out, which is why now we see multiple news stories bestowing how expensive karting is and so on as if it represents the ‘sport’ and that it’s about children trying to be in F1 i.e not good advertisement if you want to attract adults etc…
Also prior to the ‘racing ladder’ nonsense (though it has always been there to some extent) karting was pretty much the only motorsport people could do if they weren’t very wealthy. So we had a monopoly in that area and again didn’t need to promote ourselves ALL that much (tho in the UK we had more ‘street’ races and a more developed scene back in the day). Nowadays people are ragging around in C1s and sims and so on. Far more options for the potential racer than there used to be.
Karting really has never had to focus on self-promotion in any recognisable fashion as a collective. For better or worse single make racing has torn apart the concept of a collective identity too and that makes karting an incredibly difficult thing to promote because you now have multiple competing interests. Would IAME, Rotax and Vortex ever agree to work together to promote karting? Or are they more interested in nicking drivers from each other?
This I think is the responsibility of a governing body I should add, this is supposed to be the reason why you have one, but it’s clear to me they aren’t interested in doing this (here in the UK at least) and tbh they can’t. The ceded responsibility of promotion to class owners now. They have no classes of their own. So they end up being administrators for race events, and they don’t even do that all that well either. Here in the UK, a country the size of Michigen (in land mass) has so many classes I can’t even cope with the torment of listing them. So to promote ‘karting’ is incredibly difficult at a fundemental level.
I’m just going to quote myself here. In the nearly 10 years I’ve been having this conversation with folks, the common theme is “Someone else you should it.”, which is one of the chicken/egg conversations about promoting karting in a large scale.
It’s highly unlikely that someone is going to get up one day and go “Karting is awesome!” and just create a large scale media channel for it, so grassroots media is really the only way to get the sport out to folks. (It’s one of the reasons that I stopped making a karting specific podcast, and cross promote on other car enthusiasts channels where I can, instead.)
I think the most active person I’ve seen make consistent media about karting was Matt/True Racer.
I wish that more of his content had been about how to get people into the sport, as much as it was about his races, but he put some effort into his content.
Granted, the ROI of karters making community content would be low right now, because they’re not driving people to race tracks, and it’s not helping to promote their own racing.
However, in an era where everyone has access to a phone, Youtube/TikTok and Instagram, it’s never been easier to create content. Karters won’t do it, unless it promotes their own racing program.
Even then, it’s rare.
I’ll share some of my experiences coming in. Keep in mind, I’d already known about karting, own one and raced for fun against my dad on a track we had.
Information is scarce. What do I need, who do I talk to, how do I get involved??
So I go to the first drivers meeting, in half camo, I’m as redneck as they come. Stuck out like a sore thumb surrounded by kids.
Ok.
Go to the kart shop at the track I want to race at. $3000 for a rolling chassis no stand. Nothing in stock unless I want a brand new tony kart.
What?
Okay. Well, entry level oval/circle track is about $5000 a year, $8000 to run a midget. I have a budget, otherwise I’m going to oval trackin’
A midget is basically a cross between a go kart and a sprint car. Motorcycle engine powered. They move good.
If I’m going to spend $3000 on a chassis alone, I’m spending $5000 on a midget.
Now, here’s a question, Johnny is 14, Johnny just took me out, who do I talk to? Mommy and daddy didn’t take me out, Johnny did. So am I having a conversation with a parent? Or am I having a conversation with Johnny?
A club nearby has a big problem, the oval track I’m speaking of, is part of the kart track, think Daytona or Charlotte roval. So what is a 30 something going to do? Race fast cars? Or race with kids? I’m choosing karts. I’m choosing karts because I don’t need a 5 man crew to help maintain my car. Self promotion needs to be a thing that is focused on. Don’t tell someone you can’t help them if they don’t want a $5000 brand new kart.
Imagine this scenario.
No internet.
1 magazine with no technical content, not available from any retail outlet.
No racing for under 12 year olds.
All karts air cooled rotary valve 2 strokes.
No clutches , no electric start, all direct drive push start.
No 4 strokes, no indoor karting, no rental karts, no sim racing.
No dirt oval karting.
No ’ Path to F1’ No Hamilton factor . No Ginettas.
That was the UK karting scene mid 1980s
And yet there were way more people racing their own karts then than there are now…
I do believe that older karts were more accessible. Just from a visual standpoint they look far less ‘car’ than they do nowadays, even if the only difference essentially is pods. I recall a neighbour of mine racing a podless 100 National back in the day and he took it to the track on top of a 205 if memory serves me right. It was very “I could give that a go” back then.
having said that, I think karting also benefitted from a number of other factors like being the only player in that market place at the time.
All of that just tells me that there are more modern tools that people aren’t taking advantage of as much now, while other sports and mediums are.