You could try the KZ in kartkraft to get a sense of the speeds etc involved. It’s not the real thing, but it’s pretty savage. My experience in that makes me actually have no IRL interest. When things go wrong, it happens with a ton of speed. For perspective, I am not “slow” in these. I am skilled at sim and while I enjoy KZ in sim, irl it is far too costly (for me) and potentially dangerous. (But, I am old and have family responsibilities etc.).
100% what @tjkoyen said!
Also, from a pure driving perspective, I would argue that ‘talent’ is not the innate ability to drive whatever it is you climb in, it’s the innate ability to quickly learn the skills needed to drive (to extract the lessons from your experience and apply them to improve your performance). So, you can think of talent as the ability to learn, and skill as the ability to execute what you know. But ‘Skills’ never just magically happen… they are not ‘gifted’ to a select few., they are learned… the question is how quickly and how deeply…
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Well I am just going to repeat what others said, you are new to karting, so it isn’t a good idea to focus on such categories.
Depending on your age, rotax/x30 is your best bet
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How do you define knowing how to setup your kart?
As with any motorsport, a kart’s handling and setup require constant attention and adjustment to perform at the peak because track conditions change as grip levels and weather change.
Good drivers are able to feel oversteer or understeer or other issues in the handling and know what adjustments to make on the chassis to fix it. Understanding exactly how each adjustment (caster, camber, toe, track widths, axle stiffness, torsion bars, tire pressures, seat positions, ride heights, weight distribution etc.) works is an integral part of racing at a top level.
Many drivers can tell how a kart feels, and they can communicate that info to a tuner or mechanic to have them make the adjustments, but really good drivers are very in tune with exactly what the kart requires and are able to make calls on chassis setup themselves.
As I said, lots more to this than pressing the pedals and turning the wheel.
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Calin,
The primary setup adjustments are:
Tire pressure and wheel heat transfer (to reach the desired hot pressure at the right stage of the race)
Fore-aft center of gravity location by adjusting seat placement (affects midcorner handling balance)
Up-down center of gravity location by adjusting seat placement (affects how much acceleration and deceleration change the wheel loads)
mm of inside wheel lift per mm of steering wheel rotation (affects inside rear wheel load primarily on corner entry) - set by adjusting front track width, kingpin inclination, and Ackermann angle
mm of inside wheel lift per g of lateral acceleration (affects inside rear wheel load primarily on corner exit - set by adjusting chassis torsional stiffness, axle stiffness, rear track width
Secondary adjustments include:
Camber of the front tires - to achieve correct heating and either get the insides hot quickly for one very fast qualifying lap or get the whole tire hot to give good wear over the run
Toe-out or toe-in of the front tires and steering arm/spindle hole selection - to obtain the slip angles that give the most lateral force on the surface that you are racing on
Chassis rake - primarily to set the amount of lateral deflection of the rear bearing hangers (groan)
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and add to that that different chassis are affected differently by the inputs from the driver! An OTK can usually be made to go around the corner the way Mr. Robazzi and Mr. Schumacher intended by pushing on the steering wheel from corner entry to apex, while my CRG needs me to be shifting my weight all over the place and putting hundreds of Newtons of force on the inside or outside of the heel bar to set the balance correctly as the kart goes around the corners.
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That’s some great information!
So from what I understand OTK is the best to consider?
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99% of modern karts are nearly the same in design, with most differences being components and chassis materials, so most karts can be made to work well. The important thing is having a resource to help you tune the kart and get it set up properly, which is where the local team/shop comes in.
It also will depend on your category. Some karts seem to go better in single-gear classes and others are better in gearbox classes. Tire compounds and track grip levels might change that too. Your local team/shop can help you pick which will suit your needs.
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Calin,
I did way too much analysis of numbers of entries and podium finishes of various brands of karts at US races in 2019 and 2020 and not much really stood out. The Emme karts had more podiums than they should have but the sample size was tiny. Drivers on OTK chassis won by far the most races but they also finished last more frequently than every other brand combined too. Every single brand was fast some of the time and slow some of the time.
If you want to play it safe, rent a kart. They’ll usually have it in a baseline setup - for a Tony in X30 it’s practically written on the entry blank that it’s 43/57 weight distribution, H axle, grey front bar, ride height in the middle, seat placed 5 mm below the tubes if the track is smooth enough for it not to scrape, front alignment set to neutral caster, 1 degree toe out, and 1 degree positive camber on the stand. It’ll be reasonably forgiving - I’m not a Tony fan and say that it does most of the driving for you but they beat me in almost every race this year - and if you’re fast or slow you’ll know it isn’t the kart.
Quite interesting.
And regarding world championships, would you say there is a big gap between karts? Considering those are handled by teams/producers and basically, they all have the same engine?
No, not even close. OTK, BirelART, and Breda dominate at the world championships but they have by far the most teams/entries there. The best two-stroke tuners in the world also work on the engines for the world championships. So a factory entry by BirelART might have a TM engine machined, assembled, and tuned by Franco Druidi, a factory entry by Breda might have an IAME engine that is the best of an entire production run of Reedster engines, etcetera. The make of the chassis matters less than the driver or the team there just as it does at every other kart race; the polewinning chassis in OK was the only CRG at the entire event this year, the fastest laps in OK-J were turned by a Sodi last year but every other Sodi was nowhere.
It is surprising to me just how similar the laptimes are from chassis that drive radically differently. My CRG drives nothing like a Tony or a Praga or a Margay or a Parolin but we’re all scrambled up in the races. I also think that a Breda drives identically to a BirelART but fans of either brand will want to barbecue me for that statement.
I think you’ve got a good approach to this but need to see it a bit more before making any commitments. If you’ve got a few hundred euro to spend on getting good information try this:
- Go to your local track for a club race weekend. Rent a kart in the least fast adult class, drive the practice day, drive in the race
- Go to a WSK or World Championship round and buy a ticket and a pit pass. Wear a plain black shirt and hat so nobody thinks you’re from another team
You’ll see that there is a nice large range of experiences available to you in this sport, there’s a lot to learn, and most of it’s enjoyable*
Fitting tires on a day below 10C is miserable. Driving an Oldsmobile Silhouette with no air conditioning and an open trailer flat-out for hours to try to beat a storm so your kart doesn’t get ruined is nerve-racking. Showing up to a CKNA event with a borrowed kart that does not run, and once it does is dog slow in a straight line and doesn’t go around corners is frustrating right up until the last heat of the weekend when it finally all works.
So basically would you say there is no chance of winning something without a really big budget?
off-topic: I love your passion man, you’re writing books here in a few minutes just out of passion.
There is no chance of winning a World Championship without 100k euros, and even then you’d be a severe underdog there even if you were the best driver. Lewis Hamilton and Ayrton Senna never won it, for example. The factories spend hundreds of thousands of euros on those championships because they’re the best win-on-Sunday-sell-on-Monday marketing you can get.
It also takes hundreds of hours in a kart to be any good at it. @tjkoyen on this thread drove dozens of races every year before he was a father.
At the other end of the scale, Bruce Woodrow wins over half the races he drives in bringing a ten-year-old Birel/Rotax kart to the track in the back of a minivan. He spent almost $3000 racing this year, digging deep into his pockets to buy a secondhand engine to replace the one he raced for seventeen years.
Formula K owner said he didn’t really sell any more karts from winning the KZ worlds. While there’s validity in being there that helps the brand value. it’s not what it used to be in terms of win on sunday sell on monday.
The factories see these championships as big earners as well with drivers pending money with them to compete.
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If you focus on only one championship, why would raise the bar to 100k? Isn’t that a bit of exaggeration?
Nope! That’s what a factory ride would cost there.
It’s an order of magnitude less than a Formula 3 budget.
For contrast, I spent about $10,000 on racing this year and I was deliberately trying to overcome my natural instinct towards racing on the cheap. I’m sure there were plenty of parts I didn’t need and some trips that I didn’t need to take.
The higher in competition you go, the more expensive racing gets. More tires used, more days for testing and practice, etc. The big runners in the US are spending $80k+ for X30/ROK Senior racing, running just about every weekend they can. I could run a whole club season for under $3,000, but if I wanted to race nationally, a 4 race Championship costs $10,000 at the minimum. Considering if I only ran 4 races a year my driving form would be horrendous, I would want to run a club series anyways just to stay in form. That’s for a 100cc air cooled class in the US, so not even the tip of costly kart racing. The SKUSA SuperNationals is a $10,000 weekend just on its own, so you can see how the costs really spike as the level of competition goes up.
I have no idea what a season of OK or KZ racing costs in Europe, running the 4 race (for OK, 2 for KZ) European Championship, World Championship race, WSK Championship, but per driver I would not be at all surprised if it is in the 6 figure range.
Which is why we’re all pounding table on not jumping into the deep end of the pool with KZ if you have racing aspirations.
You gotta learn to drive well to race at higher levels and to do so you will need massive amounts of seat time over multiple years. This gets expensive in any kart, but decidedly more so as the engines get more powerful and the tires stickier.
You may be super talented and the next Verstappen. I hope so! But, assuming you got that level of ability, you have to make it to the grid. There’s a cost.
Most of my pro level pals eventually bowed out due to money. Unless you got piles of it, that is the limiting factor in your development.
There are no rides to be had for “free”. Euro pro karting is f1 feeder and the teams want paying customers. It’s a business.
This doesn’t mean to not bother trying. All of us here enjoy racing, most of us passionately. The trick is finding a way to compete that you can afford and that is fulfilling to you.
You could just go race f4 or similar. No karting required. Just $$$.