Do You Give Your Kart Enough Love to be Quick?

I like drivers who will happily smash the life out of their kart with zero regret, treating the machine as utterly disposable in their quest to become a great driver.

But I also have a lot of time for mechanical sympathy, not just because I’m a sufferer of excessive empathy for driving machines, but because it comes with extra speed.

In my case, the mechanical sympathy is a bit too much. I actually damage my car through driving too sympathetically. I corrode rear brakes because I carry speed rather than hammer them, and I make tyres last too long. They perish and fail the MOT before they wear out.

I have pathological mechanical sympathy and it costs me money and tyre burning fun. What an idiot!

But in karting there’s a great deal of performance in being attuned to your machinery, and caring for it will pay you back big dividends by the final race of the weekend!

Warning - Why Mechanical Sympathy Can Destroy Your Racing

First, let’s not get mechanical sympathy mixed up with making yourself weak and vulnerable. If you take care of your kart so much that you reduce the risks you take because you can’t afford to damage it, then you are making yourself weak.

If other drivers find that out they will exploit it. At a British Championship round I warned a driver of this, who preferred to be careful with the kart and stay out of everyone’s way. He was promptly fired into the wall, his weekend over, I think because he radiated ‘this is all I’ve got, please give me a break’.

Obviously another driver figured out that he could be removed as potential competition very easily indeed. That driver was correct!

How to Use Your Mechanical Sympathy to Be Formidable

Learning when to take care of your engine and when to really push it to the limit used to be an integral part of karting. We used to tune our carb jetting on the fly when 100cc was king, and it was cool af.

We used to:

• Richen the mixture to keep the engine happy, a little too rich and it would lose a lot of performance so it had to be right. This was caring for the engine.

• Lean the mixture to find the sweet spot of maximum performance, and potentially seize the engine. This was demanding more from the engine and risking killing it.

• Choke the carb to give it a giant cooling dose of fuel. We could use this as a way to try to keep the motor alive when we were running a bit lean chasing speed, and as a manual rev limiter, just to reduce the chance of a failure at 21,000 rpm.

So, old school drivers were constantly in a dialogue with the engine trying to maximise speed, and at the same time keep it alive.

You could easily be too conservative and worried about the engine and blow a race that way, or you could blow a race by blowing your engine literally asking it for too much!

But What About Today’s Karts - Where are the Performance Gains from Sympathy?

Engines are looked after now with rev limiters there’s very little scope for taking care of them, or pushing them on the fly.

But, there are big gains to be made with tyres.

When you have to run the same set of slicks for every competitive session, you can easily kill your tyres before the final. You need to be sympathetic to what can kill them early doors.

Drivers can be quick at the beginning of the weekend, and find themselves struggling in the final with no clue of what happened to them. Here’s how to show your tyres a bit of love, but also know when they need to be commanded to work when they don’t fancy it!

1. Don’t Use Your Front Tyres as Brakes