kart racin’

It was a fun and interesting night racing karts yesterday and I thought I’d take the chance to give some non-racers some insight in to what race car drivers are up to. I race in the PCA Karting Championship and we get together on the first and third Tuesday of each month. Our championship points season runs from January till May. We do non-points races the rest of the year to stay sharp.

So lately things have not been going so well for me and I’ve been struggling to stay in the top 5. This is particularly frustrating because when I came in to the series (2005?) I dominated. I was beating everyone by at least a half second. A half second is huge in a competitive racing series on a track that is 24 seconds long. I used to be able to get in a bad kart that didn’t handle well and still win. And now I have trouble getting on the podium. What gives? It’s the same people I’m racing against. They are experienced and raced for years before I met them so it’s not like they all of the sudden got faster at once.

Well I think I know part of the reason and might have gotten over it last night. I finished the last two races with the fastest lap. Being fastest does feel good.

I was a very slick night last night. The track was very low on traction. Lap times where down considerably and it was hard to maintain grip in the turns. The track is a traditional road course with seven turns, fast and slow, and a straightaway. The problem with this track is that it is almost a polished concrete surface. That isn’t good for racing karts. A lot of rubber has been laid down but often only on the racing line. So going off line can mean sliding out of control. You have to know what you are doing to late brake someone going full speed on the inside of turn one with patchy grip. I used to really enjoy drifting through turns and it seems like we haven’t had those conditions for awhile. It’s all down to temperature and humidity mostly.

Drifting (sliding) through the turns is only faster on very low grip surfaces. Usually with rubber on asphalt you go out of your way to maintain traction. Any sliding means deceleration and it takes time to regain traction and then speed. On low traction surfaces such as gravel or dirt drifting is often the fastest way around a turn. You can enter the turn faster than normal and lose your speed by swinging it around in the middle of the turn. The trick is to slide it back on to the traditional racing line while maintaining your momentum so the process of regaining traction does not lose you any speed. Maintaining the momentum is the key. None of the other drivers I race against drift in those low grip situations on the kart track. Mostly because road racers are trained not to lose traction.

We usually qualify and then run 3 races. We do standing starts. And the 2nd and 3rd race is gridded by fastest laps of the night (qualifying or race times) so the starting positions can change. Again I started the night around 5th place. I had trouble maintaining rear grip in the conditions. This happened in the first three karts I ran so it wasn’t the handling of the kart. It was my driving style. This was my opportunity to practice my theory on why I’m slow. I’m not applying myself like I did a few years ago.

Back then I lived and breathed racing. I thought about going faster all day long. How do I manipulate the car to gain a tenth of a second in that turn? I would run behind guys faster than I and figure out what they were doing that I wasn’t. I watched guys while I was waiting to run. I’d talk to other racers. I read racing theory. And it eventually paid off and for a period of time I held the track record and was quite confident that I could get in any kart in any session against anyone and I would win. That was a fun time.

So I rack my brain as to what I need to do to go faster. As I said I was having trouble maintaining rear grip. Overstear we call it. The redneck oval drivers call it gettin’ loose. Especially in the slow turns 2 and 3 I was losing all kinds of time. Why? When you brake hard the weight of your kart shifts to the front and you lose traction in the back. So in my usual hard braking into the slow turns I would lose traction on the low grip surface and have trouble rotating the kart through the turns without that rear grip. I’d loose it for a split second and it would take time to regain traction and speed. The simple answer is don’t do the usual hard braking during these low grip conditions. It allowed me to enter the turn at a much higher speed because I had that rear grip and a decently balanced kart. I picked up many tenths of a second after realizing that.

I was losing speed when losing traction on the traditional line. Then I learned how to go fast on the traditional line by braking less. Having that high speed in the low turns gave me another advantage. I was able to change to more of a rally racing line and pull off a slight drift while maintaining my momentum on exit. The higher speeds I gained in the corner was enough to give me the momentum I needed to drift through the corner and maintain exit speed. The conditions last night was one of the few times that I was able to drift around 4 of the 7 turns (all but the esses) and do it while keeping speed. I ended the night a few tenths faster than everyone else. We’ll see if I can do it more than once.