Explaining Karting To Your Neighbors

[KartingIsLife (James McMahon)]

Jason Berry AKA @Norcal_Karters is doing a video series with an intended audience of “your typical neighbor” and is looking for feedback…

[KartingIsLife (James McMahon)]

My initial thought is to group the kart types and not go into too much detail. They don’t need to know about every little nuance, chassis color or motor package at the outset. Just the general types of karts. We want to avoid confusing people and spend more time having them talk and us listen…

Random, slightly unconventional thoughts on Growing the Sport of Karting

My thought is that many of these just can’t be tackled directly, because they are out of our control. Or in many cases where they are in control, that control is directed by other interestes I think we can tackle it in two main ways that really mean that we’re more mindful and organized about how we present and or “pitch” the sport… This is something we can do right now, today as a community. When we talk to people about the sport, spend more time listening and less talking about our own pe…

Let’s assume we’re talking only about sprint racing for now…

One short video could cover the basic kart “groups”

4 Cycle (basically 206)
TaG
Shifter

At this point, there’s no reason to go into outliers, keep it simple. Next, if you want you could make a video for each group that goes into specifics.

I think it would also be interesting to add specs that compare performance a given kart “group” with both a similar well known road car and a race car.

Points could include:

• Power to Weight Ratio (including driver)
• Typical Entry fee or test fee
• Cost of a set of tires
• Number Of tracks available within 250miles of NorCal

So for a 206 you could compare to Spec Miata for a racecar (bit of a stretch though), not sure on a road, some sort of hot hatch I guess. Then do same for TaG and Shifter.

Maybe someone else has done some work on comparisons…

[Eric_Gunderson1 (Eric Gunderson)]

I mean…I wrote about this stuff a bit.

I dig the idea of these videos! I see where he is coming from.

[Matthijs_Hofman]

When I explain karting to non-racers, I focus on the sport-side. On how every lap you have a different objective, about being in the zone or being swamped. About the thrill of the perfect overtake or about the adrenaline. That’s what gets them to listen.

[Mike_Clark]

#1 question I get is how fast do they go?
My answer is I have no idea how fast they go. That intrigues them more than anything.

For a while once a month I put together a kart night at the rental side of the kart track. I would invite a bunch of guys & their guests. One thing that would tend to hook them was me telling them they shouldn’t pay for more than 2 sessions at once. How hard can it be, right?

Every one always asked to remain on my invite list.

Overall the #1 shocker was how much it wore them out. Now I know #1 should have been them being amazed at how fast I was. I know being fast is a diminishing returns sort of thing, but every time we met up for kart night I was impressed by how fast some of the guys were.

3 once a month things I organized that were fun - Kart nite, lunch at my favorite restaurant & range night where I would change up the theme like “.45 nite”. Good times every time we met up.