You Can not stop stupid, and spending 25000 on a Rotax engine you have to be really challenged.
The problem is that FIA are trying to get the Club/hobby racer onboard, their first try was the OKN engines, and as i see it they have not really been a succes.
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They can never get the ‘hobby’ person involved. You’re never going to beat a company who actually builds the engines.So emulating Rotax, IAME will fail. The FIA may as well jsut give Rotax the World/Euro status and be done with it. Which would be terrible, but save the hassle.
Also, when Rotax becomes defacto the top competitions then stuff gets real expensive real quick, and to be honest the numbers that go around now for ‘upside down’ carbs and special exhausts are far worse than I ever knew of from the FA days. KF was stupid, and OK is rubbish, but the reality is wherever someone can buy/rent equipment then their spending power will always come to the fore.
“The curse of being into karting history is that you can see what we once had, and to see it desecrated to what it is now is sad.”
Is there any good books or articles about that?
Well, you’re absolutely correct, why would any reasonable person not want to make money on literally every facet of their customers experience in the sport they operate within? You’d have to be some sort of altruistic moron not to embrace that model if you’re already in a position that prevents any ideological competition.
The way I see the FIA potentially fitting in, is by providing balance to the industry that constantly tips itself over from the top so to speak.
The US Karting product lifecycle so far as I have observed over the last ~25 years is;
- Incumbent formula is embraced by top and bottom levels of the sport.
- Top level competitors find that they can eke out more performance by running the engine at higher RPM, leaner, with more aggressive ignition timing, boring the cylinders to the largest/last size, or just buying hordes of parts to find the “good” ones and assembling “frankennotor”.
- Regional/National competitors show up at club events between big races, Joe Racer doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell against these guys, eventually feels he can’t compete, and blames it on budgets. (In reality the majority of performance difference actually comes from seat time, but personal responsibility is scary)
- The club level guys discover a different engine that seems pretty good! And it lasts quite a while between rebuilds! and it’s friendly to people entering the sport! Gosh darn it, we need more of these! Clubs begin to embrace this new formula and eventually the top level guys get a taste, and start making noise that we should just run this at bigger events too. We’re now return to step 1.
This cycle takes approximately 3-5 years. My theory as to why, is because the top level is largely contested by highschool aged kids who exit the sport when their parents send them off to college.
My thoughts on the FIA categories providing balance, is based on the idea that if we allow the top level of karters to have engines that are actually meant to be top level race engines that can be readily modified within the ruleset, rather than wasting time/money by hunting for parts at the ends of manufacturing tolerance, we will eventually reach a point where everyone more or less knows what does/doesn’t work, and parity can be more readily achieved.
Meanwhile, the “hobby” engines can be run at the levels below the top, and won’t be stretched beyond their design scope in the way they currently are. The IAME and Vortex single make series missions are to provide approachable competition, not to be the pinnacle of the sport.
Theres further benefit on the industry side, but I’ve rambled enough.
Also, I’ve almost forgot, to answer your question about any current or past promoter succeeding without that model, SKUSA is a great example before they took over the IAME importership.
I think that an active/functional FIA delegation in the US would/should help promote karting in a way that advances the sport as a whole, rather than a specific manufacturers product. If that encourages rental karting competition? Great! That’s an excellent gateway to competition karts which we all love.
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I don’t think it’s possible for me to agree more with a take than this, it’s pretty much a 100% spot on analysis.
The issue i (personally, without any prejudice to the statements issued by my President) see is that the problem with racing is… racing.
The KA100 was a fantastic idea with a defined target in mind. Spec class, removal of components, reduction in engine capacity, rev limiter, cheap auxiliary components = reduction in cost for the end user from the get go, and lowering of running costs as well.
The class gets launched, everyone is in awe to the price / performance ratio and the target demographic of the product flocks in (club and regional level customers)
But then, the inevitable happens (as it did with Rotax, as it did with Vortex, as it did with IAME): People start racing, they find ways to exploit the 30 pages homologation documents and divergence in performance happens. Pro-level drivers start coming in, tuners begin making a business case out of a stock engine and suddenly you look in the mirror and realize the difference in price between an X30 and a KA100 is not that big…
This is the fundamental of racing, chasing performance is the only thing that matters, which is why i personally believe it is very very very difficult to have a cost-controlled spec series…
In regards to the FIA’s involvement with the US, Ryon said it very well in that our national ASN is not active and does not govern the sport per se. The market is fragmented amongst private promoters that have each their own rules, their own licenses (which is crazy to hear for someone that’s used to a European system) and their own modus operandi. Our duty is to write regulations and provide platforms and tools for our ASNs to deploy and utilize. If they don’t for whatever reasons, we cannot force them…
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Market monopolization is not the solution to high prices. Who believes this stuff?
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But what if I threw in cute buzz words like “vertical integration” and “green fuel initiative” (nevermind the fact everyone dumps a liter of 50/50 ricin/crude oil [It’s okay, it’s a compulsory purchase from our altruistic monopoly running benefactors as well!] into every can.)
Oh yeah, this is what the free market is all about.
I dunno. Is that how rent controls work? I’m still not seeing the positive outcomes with such an approach. I suppose if performance &/or specification controls are about as much “control” as could be reasonably implemented, but even that won’t prevent. I guess I’m stuck in KZ think here. Spec the motor displacement (& gearbox in KZ), carburetor, & ignition. The fact that nobody gripes about different chassis brands just clearly shows how power performance gets all the emphasis. Nobody gives a damn about handling performance. This is one of the reasons why I like the KZ ES motors, because the focus is on reliability & usability instead of raw output, & I just focus on chassis setup.
The costs seem largely centered on power output, & typical of that, costs rise exponentially, inverse of the gains, which diminish towards the upper limits of output. But because of a biased perception of gained advantage in that area, that’s where the money goes. Less-to-no time/money for driver-focused improvement, or emphasis on getting more out of the chassis. I bet if Verstappen raced a bone stock KZ against some of the world’s best today, he’d likely place in the top 5-10. But that’s just my biased opinion.
Ah, but an engine that makes adequate power in the first place cuts out the reason for karters to spend more to get marginal power benefits out of them.
A recently rebuilt used 206 that makes 9.7 horsepower when the 2nd through 6th strongest engines in a national field make 9.6 would be worth $10,000.
A recently rebuilt SSE 175 that makes 48.5 horsepower instead of 47.5 would be worth $3,100 instead of $3,000. We almost got there with it, it was stopped by a horrible carburetor and a compression ratio more suitable for a diesel than a spark-ignition engine…
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Of course, a 19:1 fuel-oil ratio would be completely pointless if you used an engine that wasn’t trying to slide an aluminum piston against an iron liner that expands 1/3 as much!
The thing is, In these spec classes there will always be tuners that claim their engines is min 0,3sec faster, the next one has an Exhaust that are min 0,2 sec faster, the next an carb that gives min 0,2 sec. Some belives In this and falls for it. UK karting is a perfect example of that, we have some of the same where i live, but In reality its often far from the truth, we have seen people sending engines to other places In EU to get “tuned” because its min 0,4 sec faster, where we come with our out of the box engine and drivers right up to them, often its more a quistion of maintenance/setup and the squisy bit behind the wheel that makes the biggest difference.
Wait a second. Rotax is literally releasing a new barrel to address ‘parity’ issues. Are they wrong?
Value is dependent on demand. If the 175 was the biggest class int he country by a mile the extra HP would be far more valuable than 100 dollars.
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Ok. There’s “the” Rotax engine, which goes for five or ten times what a random new Rotax lists at.
Does that engine exist in KZ?
If we had 55 horsepower in shifters, would 56 even be worth a paint mark on the cylinder to mark it out as special?
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That is the problem with the integrated parity fallacy present with spec racing which becomes too professionalized…
The will to get ahead pushes “tuners” to look for solutions that are grey at best and outright illegal at worst. Worst of all, these disparities make their way down the ladder eventually to a lucky few, which partake to events that do not have adequate tech to find the icks and further demoralizes everybody else racing (the amount of treated X30 cylinders and pistons i have seen is astonishing, believe me…)
The entire point of open class racing is that you don’t have to do that. Performance is to be found with actual tuning work elsewhere, which inevitably converges when everyone kind of understood what works and the regulations remain stable (see the current KZ landscape).
You guys have a healthy karting market (i suppose you’re in Sweden), and your ASN is one of the most organized in Europe.
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With regard to power, yes power make sa difference. In Div1
Convergence shouldn’t be a desire. It’s tacit acceptance of the spec-philosophy. I think the sport fails to celebrate engineers and tuners and thus ceded ground to the ruinous and bland spec-racing system. The reality is tuners don’t want to be equal, they want to dominate.
Maybe in theory. But in practice no, it wouldn’t. In fact I’d counter there’s a good chance the 9.6hp could finish first 
. On track, the draft compensates (to some degree) a variance in power. While you can’t stop people spending money, you can reduce the advantage that throwing money can make.
5 karts at 9.7 will beat everyone else at 9.6 though 
Why stop at 9.7? We can talk in hypotheticals all day…. But I’m not going to.
Like I said, the draft is more of a factor compared to other classes. I’ll leave it to some actual fast drivers to chime in on that. Find .1hp in engine, you can easily soak up 1/2hp in chassis.
Depends on who is driving the 9.6
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