Racing drivers live to find the maximum in everything.
That’s why I believe fitting more and more plastic bumpers to karts is sheer folly. Drivers quickly find all the exploits and start using them to their advantage. And nobody should be surprised that fitting giant squidgy plastic bumpers all around karts creates a lot of contact.
Of course, when I raced it was a ‘naked’ kart. And guess what, there was virtually zero contact. I had fewer incidents involving contact in my whole life as a kart driver than you have in a single race now.
This is why I don’t really think teaching drivers that they must respect each other is in the least bit relevant.
When I raced the only respect you required was for physics!
Contact back in the day resulted in highly unpredictable ballistics, so we didn’t do it, and in order to not hit another kart we needed a certain amount of space. That happened naturally, nobody needed to tell anyone a thing about racing with respect. You didn’t really need any roasting from officials, you learned the hard way - it really bloody hurt.
So, my point is racing drivers are elemental creatures who race to the limits, they exploit physics and the environment to the maximum. If you think you can teach them respect with words whilst shrouding the karts in plastic protection, you don’t understand the nature of the beast.
That’s why race and respect campaigns are purely performative, who they are performing for I will never know - but the drivers at the front simply do not give a flying monkey’s about the ethical guidelines that nobody adheres to.
They will continue to add plastics and absurd roller rear bumper contraptions forever, so contact it looks, is here to stay.
Given that plastics, and therefore really blatant contact driving, is probably here to stay and may even get worse, we have to learn how to live with it.
That doesn’t mean chucking out your own ethics as a driver, it just means learning how to deal with it so you can get the most out of yourself as a driver.
Some Big Contact Driving Do Nots
1. If you are subject to contact driving, don’t sit back and rely on officials to fix the problem.
They can’t be expected to notice more than ten percent of contact on a 34 kart grid. And even if they do, they penalise and never compensate you. That means if you get fired off, you don’t get any positions back.
So if you get victimised, you remain victim. Punishing the driver who launched you doesn’t really help much.
In other words, nobody is going to solve this problem, you are going to encounter contact driving come what may.
2. If you get fired off, don’t have a little arm waving fit.
The best way to establish your weakness as a driver is to flap your arms around in protest after someone fires you off.
Of course, the pilot who did knock you off is gone and won’t see you, but anyone who does will realise that you are vulnerable. It seriously undermines your reputation as a tough competitor.
Much better to completely ignore what happened and resolve to do something about it later. No, I don’t mean a like-for-like reprisal, I mean absorb the nature of racing and resolve yourself to adapt in a strong way.
When a driver waves their arms it means they are not compatible with the hard world they are in.
Hard But Fair Racing - The Best Approach
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