First of all, thank you for your suggestions. At present, the child has overcome his fear of kart speed and his progress is fast. He is 6 and a half years old now and has been training for 7 months. I think he should be able to enter the next stage of study. How do I teach kids to attack and defend karting? Thanks
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I think a kid has to first know and understand what the proper racing line would be first. Once he knows the “fast” way around the track he needs to understand why the “fast” way leaves openings for drivers to drive under him. One thing I did with my daughter when she first started was to have her race the line and I would follow her and then pass her on the inside or outside. Then when we got off track I would explain to her how I was able to get around her and how a more “defensive” line would have prevented that.
Gee. Tough question. As an adult who is relatively new I didn’t bother with trying to defend until I was more confident. I think the first thing I had to get over was passing slower karts first.
How far along is the child in their racing? How many starts?
At 6?? I wouldn’t be worrying about racecraft much at all. At the minimum, I wouldn’t be worrying about defensive driving. As I was learning racing, my thought process went “well, I’ve got 20 people ahead of me and 5 behind me, I’m gonna focus on what’s ahead.” There’s no point in knowing how to defend when there’s nobody behind to defend from.
I’ll also say I didn’t start really learning about racecraft until I was in my second or third year of racing. Even then when I started learning, I learned how to attack first, and defending fell into place as I had to think about not only defending the same moves I was learning to make on my competitors, but also how to defend the after the pass to keep the other driver from getting back through me right away.
My general point is, being that young I would start showing them how to get by other drivers, and as they improve and situations arise then work on defensive racing.
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I think your next big hurdle will be teaching him to run consistent laps at a fast pace. Then teach him how to pass. Kid Karters struggle with consistency and passing. So there will be nobody to pass him if he runs fast and consistent, and he’ll need to know how to get around people when he catches them.
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Defending will be useful to teach him as soon as it becomes relevant. Mostly because people don’t know that weaving around isn’t defending but rather is blocking.
Defending is positioning your kart once as you approach braking zone. And that one move is not a huge swerve but rather a kart width.
This is putting the kart way before the horse, however.
I bring this up in that if you see your child weaving around trying to block, explain that weaving around is a no no. It’s not fast and it’s a bad idea. That would be a good situation to begin discussing defense, because he’s clearly thinking about it.
The child runs 15 laps per quarter, the lap speed is still good, but the lap speed is not very stable
If they aren’t consistent yet, there’s no point in teaching them the finer points of racecraft like defending and attacking. At this point, the main focus should be understanding consistency and hitting the same braking and apex points every corner, every lap.