Don't Be the Little Prince Driver

Why taking on as much as you can as a driver beats the big budgets

If you want to be a standout driver, a good place to start is finding out what really exasperates team managers about their current crop of pilots.

That’s what I do occasionally, and the insights can be invaluable.

My latest chat with a top team owner highlighted a driver who gets unsettled by a teammate and then starts complaining about the kart. While that specific scenario might not resonate with everyone, the core issue certainly does: drivers complaining about something that isn’t the actual problem.

When team managers get brutally honest, they often admit the only thing that truly makes a fundamental difference to performance is the driver. Everything else is tweaking. It’s ironic because teams charge money for that tweaking, yet they'll also say a proper driver often doesn't need it!

Now, what can you gain from this? It might sound like drivers are just being blamed for everything. And your team might not tell you this directly – they need customers, after all. Or perhaps you aren't in a formal team, but someone nearby is probably biting their tongue.

Hopefully, I can translate what team managers are expressing (or suppressing) into something useful, helping you turn their frustrations into your winning performance.

Not everything is your fault as a driver. BUT… act like it is, and suddenly things can get better very fast.

Are you a victim of circumstances – wrong setup, no engine power, getting punted off track?

Or are you the driver of your own results?

The "Little Prince" vs. The Driver

Plenty of drivers winning races fall into this first category of what I call the ‘the little prince’. There are a ton of them (and any gender can be one), and that's fine, but they aren't in my audience.

They can sit looking at their phone all day, get on the kart with a great engine, setup all fine, and go and win. My question is, so what? That's just a happy little prince winning with exceptional engine power and absurd seat-time.

When they don't win, since they have negligible input to the kart, they can say 'it's not my fault,' blaming pressures or whatever it is. They can actually say they are right too!

Often, just to make that picture a bit more annoying, they are fast... maybe seat time fast, but fast nonetheless.

So they can be hard to beat.

At the same time, it's lovely to beat them! That's what their purpose is: to serve a proper driver, giving you a more fun opponent to hammer.

The little prince is not a model to follow.

You need to go the exact opposite way. Team managers might tolerate the princes because they pay the bills, but they respect (or even love) the drivers who take everything into their own world.

Get Involved With Your Kart

That means if your chain guard falls off, don’t just blame the mechanic because "it's his job."

Instead, ask yourself, ‘Did I have time to pick up a 10mm spanner and check those two nuts that regularly work loose?’

The answer is almost always yes. The beauty of karts is that anyone, any age, can get deeply involved. In fact, it's essential. You need to know your kart inside out because in parc fermé, when it starts raining and everything needs changing, you are 50% of the labour force capable of adjusting track widths, swapping clutches or sprockets, making caster changes, and setting pressures.

You absolutely must be handy with the spanners.

If you accept that premise, then logically, every mechanical issue you encounter during a race weekend has an element of your responsibility. You must be able to contribute to setup changes, discuss them intelligently, and ultimately sign off on them.

Don’t let anyone distance you from your kart.

It could be your mechanic, your parents, your buddy. Don't allow them to stand between you and your machine – you need that affinity. Resist the luxury of letting someone else do everything. You have to insist, even forcefully, that you work on your kart.

When you drive a kart you have personally worked on, you become emotionally invested in making it work. You have to make it work!

With Responsibility Comes Great Power