I’d guess a lot of karting history is forgotten, which is kinda sad.
My own personal experience indicates that its not well preserved. I raced heavily in the florida region in 1999-2001, raced and podiumed at the Skusa US amateur nationals, podiumed at the 2001 super nationals, had a pro win at the winter tour in 2002, and had multiple top tens in Skusa Superpro in 2002.
All of that and basically none of it is on the internet anywhere. Searching skusa’s site is like there was no karting before 2010.
Great pictures Alan!
I love this thread, I’m from 80’s and 90’s long circuit karting and love looking back at the golden era of karting which in my mind was the 80’s. Here is a clip from the 1982 British kart GP at Silverstone on the old full circuit. I did the gp for ten straight years. It was a crazy event, most races were a drafting contest. One year I went from tenth on the last lap to fourth by drafting past a long train of drivers.
There is still quite a following of retro karting in the UK I believe.
I need to add this to my Stan Mott story, but I have found what happened to Bill Davis (he actually was the guy who came up with the idea and was on it before Mott joined). he disappeared from the story when Stan went to Morocco. now I know that apparently he crashed his kart into another car (I think). He went back to the USA and got a Duffy Livingsone built minibike and rode it across the country.
Fantastic thread, keep it coming! I focused my Master’s thesis on hot rodding and how grassroot motorsport movements were the true catalyst for automotive innovation in the 20th century. This stuff was truly organic market research, as handy people were able to show what and how they wanted to race, greatly influencing organizations and manufacturers. Like all racing karting does require some funds, but it’s fascinating because it seems you can still get by and innovate with a modest budget and a solid brain.
It’s sad it’s often seen as not being important by academics just because it seems like indulgent fun on the surface. Technological investigation through sporting “combat” goes back to ancient times, so I’m glad we’re gathering it together.
I really should have given a greater mention to karting in my writing. Hot rodding at least has the benefit of the long running magazine to look back on. I’m very curious about obscure threads that we can use to connect karting to the larger motoring world, there’s some pretty wild butterfly effects that have occurred thanks to people in their garages throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
Hot Rod magazine and Car and Craft (and Kart) all featured karting heavily in late 50s and early 60s. In some respected you can’t divorce the two. Hot Rod Mag was key to the success of karting in the early days.
I should try getting my hands on the complete archive and poring over the karting articles, it looks like you can pay to access scans of old issues on their website. Hot Rod really was a forum before the internet, but with arguably even more visibility to the public. Thanks to it being sold at magazine stands all over, it didn’t have to deal with algorithms and search engines.
I remember running into some karting articles in my research, but after a point my thesis became more about the sociological angle of why accessible wrenching+racing is vital moreso than chronicling the individual butterfly effects, even though that bit is immensely fun. You only need so many examples to construct an argument for the former and motoring is full of them.
I should pick up writing again, I feel compelled to keep going with my findings now that I’m free from grad school and actually karting. You know you’re dorking out about something when editing down to 10,000 words for the sake of your professor’s sanity is the hard part hehe
He scans all the karting articles from each issue from back in 1960/61 mainly. A focus on karting was no doubt aided by the influx of karting advertisers too. Hot Rod magazine was critical to karting’s spread across America and into the UK.
By 1962 we had a decent amount of specialist magazines, but the early days of karting are routed in Hot Rod Magazine. Especially when 54-60. Karting really came from hot-rod culture.
Awesome, will give that a look, and that makes a ton of sense. I saw the TT stuff earlier, do you think hillclimbing had an affect on the UK karting scene’s development, or was it closer to the motorcycle road racing scene there? I feel like there has to be some shared names, Austin 7s and hills go together like Model As and salt flats.
Karts did appear on the hill climbs, eventually they kinda got banned from a lot of places via regulations (tho people would adapt their kart to suit new regs and eventually u had these weird Frankenstein kart-like machiens), though I still think they do them over in Jersey. I can’t say for sure, there’s some many weird quirks that still exist here and there.
A guy named Paul Biagi took his road-registered Buckler to Rest and be Thankful venue in Scotland in the '60s. He would drive to some venues in it.
Did it have an effect on karting’s development? Hard to say. Karting really took off here because of the expanse of RAF airfields that could host races very quickly. Also karting went to a lot of stock car/speedway type places too which were around.
I think the hill climb stuff would have been supplementary in influence along with all the other mad stuff happening then.
Though the Long Beach shots are cool, these 5 pages of Duffy Livingstone’s scanned negatives give a real sense of the height of karting’s genesis and early popularity:
What really strikes me is just how ‘professional’ the factory and production are, for such a ‘toy’ (leisure) product. In that sense, GoKart Products was every bit as pro as OTK… Azusa Engineering is still around, and I still buy some of their products. I do wish those half-moon tanks never left production. I’m hoping to re-pop them.
