At first glance, there seems to be mostly Arrive and Drive. For club racing, Clay Pidgeon seems to have good attendance. High of 115 entries, 10 races per season, 9 classes, or so.
The geography is striking though. The entire UK is slightly smaller than California and about the same size as Illinois and Wisconsin combined.
Edinburgh is Tahoe and Paris is San Diego!
They woudn’t like the direction I’d want to go in because I’d put karters first. The FIA Karting division will absolutely not accept deviation from subseviance to F1. I’d want F1 as far out of the paddock as possible. It’s the root of 90% of FIA karting’s problems.
To be honest I have thought about developing a breakaway type thing. I can easily put some technical regulations together for engines and chassis. As I get older the more interested I am in that idea.
You probably want to look at Whilton Mill Kart Club and Shenington Kart Club for bigger clubs. Trent Valley Kart Club is probably biggest but they arent on alpha live from what i can tell.
When i was racing in the early noughties 6 to 10 big clubs were getting 300 to 400+ entries.
The Cik/Fia dont have a clue about running karting for the “normal” karter(Dad paying the bills). This OKN hasbeen tried before In the KF4 engine and the attendence tothat was absolutely zero, our ASN here is still claiming that CIK is the way forward, and i will bet that they will claim the OKN to be the salvation of everything. But it wont change a thing, OKJ which have a good engine is still lagging attendence, so how is the OKN going to change anything, fact is most want a single make class, its simply more easy with no choices to be made about radiators, engine make, carburators, special parts inside the engine, airfilters etc. Only to go back to start after 3 years.
Cik/Fia is for the top championchips where money do not matter, let Iame X30, Rotax and Rok handle the rest of us.
They cancelled their June meeting citing entry numbers and their July meeting is far from where you would expect for summer.
I think club karting in the UK is in some level of recognisable decline now. Sure a club like Whilton does well, but that’s mostly because of its location.
I don’t agree. Normal people should have the oppunrutinty and desire to race in the FIA classes. Single-make racing is less culturally fulfilling in my view.
The mistake the FIA make, and it’s fundemental, is they try and introduce specs that replicate Rotax etc… When Rotax has a 6 month warrenty and a reliable spare part availabiltiy iI find it hilarious the FIA are going with the ‘relaibility line’. DO they really not know what they are competing with? Rotax is so far ahead on those metrics the FIA are setting themselves up for a fall.
Anyway, we’ll see. I really don’t care for OK-N having seen the specs. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but it’s certainly not a desirable product for me. And I suspect plenty who are working on this feel exactly the same way. Politics as usual rules the day.
I would like to play a game though. 
Guess the FIA press release headline after this weekend?
Headline: “Successful Tests with Karting Protagonists at Franciorta Demonstrates OK-N Reliability”
Picture: Random photo of CIK president.
Video: Corporate style video highlighting the OK-N engine with some generic copyright free music. Maybe a few bullet points with relaibility being the first one. Second one will be “A chance to race on the world stage”. You know, something devoid of personality.the ‘back to the roots’ thing annoys me,.
The FIA are a govening body, they can’t offer warranties. They don’t build the engines.
If the FIA wants to make in-roads to the EU/UK club racer maybe they shouldn’t compete with the established Rotax and X-30 but ASAP create a class similar to the IAME TaG 100cc motor with a 6 month warranty before IAME 100cc TaG takes hold of European club racing, as it has in the US.
I noticed that most of the racing in the UK appears to be arrive and drive and at best, club entries are around 115 or so, not that impressive.
We have multiple chassis makes & no one bats an eye, but even suggesting more than 1 engine make gets derision. It’s a curious, though somewhat understandable dichotomy, but a dichotomy none the less.
I have 5 big clubs within an hour of me. Entry per square mile is probably one of the highest in the world. The sport isn’t what it once was though.
I have thought about this… a lot, but I think psychologically people see chassis as preference, whereas motors are more binary in performance characteristics. The old adage is a “good driver can win on any chassis”. However, you can’t really compete when your motor isn’t there. You can’t adapt to a slow engine, not really. It is weird I know, but I think that’s the pscyhological root of the weirdness.
More or less allready made that, but yes there will be more In near future, they did the same when introducing theKF system.
Have to take into consideration the density of tracks in the UK vs US when looking at entry numbers. I’d say per capita the UK is way ahead of the US… (speaking to paved sprint only here)
Couldn’t they mandate engine builders to offer warranties?
I do agree that per capita or per geographic area UK is ahead of the US but I was imagining UK club entries would be much larger.
Mandated warranties in a performance based class would be unreasonable. They aren’t being built in the quantities Rotax are, so the manufacturers would have to up the base cost and cost of spares.
sometimes they are. You can’t really analyse without seeing the full picture. Whilton sold out before the year. It was crazy. Some clubs have two club meetings a month both IKR and MSA as well. Some tracks are literally next door to each other - Fulbeck and PFI.
The NKC is a national championship, but works just like a club in many respects, and that had 240 entires the ther weekend.
CLub karting is struggling here, but in terms of land density we proabbly have more sprint karitng per square mile than almost all other countries.
Need to get a bit more energy into this the FIA do.
Did they disclose the lap times for such tests? I am wondering how fast/slow is it compared to OK.
OKJ is in average 1.5 sec slower than OK.
