I’m curious as to the accident rate at other kart racing series (club, regional, national) and what people find as an acceptable rate of serious accidents. For the purposes of this discussion, lets define “serious” as one in which the injured require immediate transport by ambulance to a nearby hospital.
Background:
My kid and I started karting 3 years ago when they were 13 years old and there have been many things to love but one thing is driving me from the sport. Last year we raced a regional series, running 206 Junior and 206 Senior, with 6 weekend races during the summer months. Out of those 6 race days, 4 different people required transport by ambulance in 3 separate incidents. These we’re not just precautionary ambulance trips as 3 of the 4 resulted in multi-day stays in the ICU. Talking with several other people, I’ve since learned, the series had 2 separate fatalities several year ago which led to a club name change and different board of directors.
Sunday was our second race of this years series and once again we had a horrible accident. A driver flipped in their kart while running one of the 206 classes. They laid motionless in the middle of the track and did not regain consciousness in the time it took for the ambulance to arrive (20+ minutes) and take them away. Once the ambulance was off track the marshal gave the order for the next group to start their formation lap as if nothing occurred.
In Summary:
6 Race Days (1 Qualify + 1 Heat + 1 Final)
Senior KA100 (~10 drivers) – 2 serious injuries
Senior LO206 (~20 drivers) – 1 serious injury
Master LO206 (~10 drivers) – 1 serious injury
A 1:60 chance of being seriously injured any give race day.
This does not count the numerous crashes/flips where the injured took themselves to the hospital for sprains, broken bones, etc.
Is this normal?
Addendum:
My intent is not to point fingers but for context I will say our series is located in the central portion of the USA.
Although it’s implied what a serious accident might be, I think the first thing we should do is establish and agree on what’s considered a serious accident or injury.
ICU stay is an absolute given of course. Neck, spinal or skull/brain injury is serious IMO. Concussion might be debatable for some, for me, especially with developing brains I consider a concussion as a serious injury.
Sprained ankle I’m on the fence about. Not saying it doesn’t suck to have one though.
Agreed.
Although, I don’t want to get into this injury counts that one doesn’t cause everyone has their own standard of acceptable risk.
To me a serious injury is something a healthy person will never fully recover from. In the serious injuries I was referencing we have a punctured lung, ruptured spleen, broken pelvis (screwed back together), broken vertebrae and 2 serious head injuries (rehab to walk and talk again).
I’m just curious if this is standard across the sport? I so, then perhaps the level of risk I’m willing to accept to is too low for this sport. Or, perhaps our club is an outlier in which case the participants (myself included) should look into why.
That is way more frequent injuries than I have ever seen in 30+ years on and off in the sport. I have seen maybe 5 people total in my life leave the track in an ambulance. Crashes happen but are typically not bad. Most times I’ve seen someone upside down or out of the kart they were ok enough to walk away.
Bad things can happen but the frequency experienced by the OP doesn’t sound typical.
In all my kart and kart-type racing since 1988, I’ve seen 2 ambulance rides, 1 at Daytona, 1 at Roebling Road. (Road Racing)
I’ve not seen any sprint race accidents that resulted in serious injury, but the level of damage to hardware was impressive, and led me to conclude that escape from injury was only by chance / luck.
I have been concerned about what tracks are allowing to happen during races, and think things should be run ‘tighter’ with more driver discipline. I have yet to see a true black flag for anyhing other than mechanical issues.
I’ve also seen a slacking of regard for each other among drivers. Before, we were friendly competitors with mutual respect. Now, it seems to be more casual disregard, or even outright aggression. That’s at the club level locally. Ironically, the series I did in 2017 was one of the more collegial experiences, especially among us privateers. There was less on-track carnage also.
Yeah I would agree that this seems like an unusually high frequency for injuries or ambulance rides. Also have been doing this for over 20 years and I can count maybe half a dozen serious injuries I’ve seen at the track. And most injuries are things like simple broken bones, road rash, etc. Usually nothing too serious that requires rehab or internal organ damage.
A series having two fatalities within a relatively short span is pretty insane. Something seems very strange about the situation at your club. Our club has huge numbers compared to yours and even with a mix of newbies and experienced drivers, injuries are rare. And even onto regional and national racing where it’s more cutthroat, there are not many ambulance calls. I think I saw one total all last season.
Sounds excessive from our 5 years of experience. I have seen two sets of broken legs (one of which was fairly recently), concussion and maybe few other broken bones like fingers or collarbones.
Do you know if the fatalities were related to safety issues surrounding the track? What are the series safety requirements?
As TJ mentioned, or club regularly has 150+ entries per event. I have been with the club 10 years (6 on the board if directors) and can only recall one or 2 times an ambulance was called. We run everything from Kid Karts to KA Masters, with more than 25 karts on track at a time.
We ensure all karts are safe to run on track, and we usually have 2 race officials making penalty calls to keep things safe. We also ensure our racing surface is well maintained and we have crash bags all around the track.
For the numbers you are mentioning, something is VERY wrong on multiple levels. I have not heard of a karting fatality in a long time. I believe last year someone dies, but they were very old and may have had a medical emergency.
Subjectively, based on my conversations with insurance companies I would say what you’ve experienced is an outlier, by quite some degree. Those are some nasty injuries so I can understand your dilemma as far as risk tolerance is concerned.
Putting a little time and thought into it I believe there are several factors at play but in the end it really comes down to what the drivers (and parents of kids) find acceptable. Unfortunately, the unsafe behavior and track conditions have become normalized to those still competing and new people such as myself just accept it until we can’t any longer.
Several of your have mentioned the low numbers and this has been an increasing trend within the series. Just 3 years ago the series was fielding >140 racers every event and this year we’ve struggled to hit 50.
How have conversations gone with the event organizers gone regarding safety? I’m sure some things could be done to mitigate risks. Driving standards, track safety (barriers etc)