What Seat for OTK 401s/Victory S etc?

Interested to see what seat everyone is running in there OTK Karts. is everyone sticking with the standard OTK seat or are they running something different.

currently running standard OTK seat in a Victory S in X30 at 160kgs on MG Yellows in Australia.

obviously the easy answer is to get some seats and test but interested to see what others are running and why

Have always either run the standard OTK seat or the Tillett T11 in Yamaha through X30.

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Standard seat or Tillett T11.

You can sort of imitate the Tillett by running the lower seat mounting bolts loose, if you wanted to try that.

Speaking of seats, how does a different seat change the handling of a kart. I heard OTK uses really stiff seats because the frames are so soft. Would putting a softer seat in help with our understeer problem? Or would we try to use a stiffer seat for that?

This is a very last ditch effort I feel like, changing an axle would be an easier endeavor, which we still need to try this year.

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when you say T11 what rigidity are you using just the standard T11t or the T11Vg.

i have all ways just run the standard otk seat and tuned around it but have noticed lots of guys (fast ones) seem to be running the t11vg

I switched from a rather stiff Tillett t12 to a softer IMAF F6 silver this season in my Praga. The change was instantly noticeable in not only how I could actually feel the kart flex and jack but has also made the kart tunable. A slight position change before the last race seems to have eliminated understeer and I now feel like I can finally place the kart where I want it on the track. The stiffer seat just prevented the chassis from working properly.

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I’ve run both the Tillet T11t and the standard OTK seat in my Racer 401. Those seats are identical, so I ended up going with the standard OTK seat since its cheaper. As far as seat position goes, I’ve tried the factory recommended seat positions for my height as well as a couple seat positions recommended by 2Wild Karting. Since my height is exactly 170cm, I tried both the 160-170 and the 170-180 seat positions, finding better performance with the 160-170 seat position since I mostly race KPV’s. The 2Wild seat positions were very close to the factory recommended positions, the main difference being the ease of installing the seat when using the 2Wild positions, and performance being nearly identical to the factory positions. If I was racing an X30 I think the 170-180 seat position would work better. Kartingmagazine.com had a good read about a test they ran comparing the 3 seat stiffness of the Tillet T11 on a Tonykart Racer. I believe they found the stiffer the seat, the looser the kart ran in the rear. I’m sure this is not true for other karts though.

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Back in the old days when we had a wet and dry kart (2000-2003) we would run a soft seat in the dry kart and a stiff seat in the wet kart.

The methodology still seems to apply with the softer Tillet making an appearance when its grippy. Probably one of the guys on here who do a lot more testing then me can confirm or deny that with more authority then me.

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It’s not necessarily an easy answer, but generally you’d want a soft seat for a wet track to help the kart flex instead of simply transferring that force to the tire and causing it to slide. In a pinch this can be emulated by loosening all of the mounting bolts and removing struts.

Though the old 00-03 chassis tend to work almost backwards of the modern stuff. Likely a consequence of the relative difference in Kingpin/Spindle to frame stiffness.

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