Living on the Edge
What does it mean to be at the limit of a kart
Living on the edge, existing at the limits, all that kind of ‘face death - live life’ stuff is what it means to be a racing driver. That’s the attraction of racing, and its what makes every day life appalling in comparison. It is meaning.
It is very easy to find yourself at your own limits when you are new to karting, because everything is completely mental and overwhelming. That’s where you discover yourself, that you are a nutter and get addicted to living on the edge.
Karting becomes the meaning of life, it blows everything else out of the window.
But something happens as you get better at controlling your racing machine, you begin to tame it. Comfort creeps into driving and finding the limit becomes a bit of a chore sometimes. Results and lap times start to replace the sheer exhilaration, and so you start searching for technical advantages and reading stuff like my articles on technique and data.
I think most drivers actually lose the desire to reach and hold the limit, because racing life becomes so complicated with finding tenths through every possible avenue.
The ‘feels’ for living on the edge, where magical performance is found, gets replaced with hard facts, science and realities of racing. That means the more mundane aspects of hitting marks, and life in the paddock chasing set-ups and engine power.
Bringing back the magic - feel for the limit and holding it
When a kart is held at the limit through a corner there is a peculiar feeling that comes with it.
Normal quick driving is really like a dot-to-dot, hitting marks procedure - but the feeling is normal and exactly what you expect. You feel grip and g-force.
But the more magical untouchable quick driving does create some weird feelings with a kart. You will recognise this I expect and recall that yeah, it was a special bit of driving…
How does the limit feeeeel…
By limit I mean you go to the very edge of what the kart is capable of producing.
The feel of the kart changes, it can feel like you are floating but on a razor edge.
Or you feel the kart is light and delicate, in a perfection state that if you do anything to upset it, it will turn to shit in an instant.
It’s not the normal heavy load g-force feeling. It feels like something broke but you know it didn’t.
A feeling for delicate rotation of the kart takes over, and very commonly you can feel a disconnection, where it becomes very obvious that your hands and feet are doing their own thing.
A bit of slow motion comes into it, where you become so focussed on holding the kart in this delicate perfection that you feel like time slowed down so you can fit every tiny adjustment needed to stay on the razors edge of perfection.
In this kind of state you can find yourself driving like a god, where steering seems to feel light and central almost all the way through corners, the rear steers itself and your feet do a delicate genius dance that makes the kart magically light and in its own groove.
And also, inexplicably quick. Sustainably quick too, the kind of lap consistency where you take a photo of your mychron.
A quick diversion - sometimes it just happens at random times
Really annoying, and it's a real problem this. Sometimes you can trip over a perfection moment on an out lap, an in lap, or before you have even learnt a track while you are carefree, because naturally you have this in you... But once you start working on a lap, the ease of hitting this magical limit driving - it's gone. It’s something that does my head in because data can show you took a corner one way when you didn’t know the track and you just can’t get it back. I haven’t solved it - sorry!
So all that otherworldly weird stuff is not what we are thinking about at the track. But it’s kind of the point, because we are racing drivers and we are all about living at the very limit, on the edge of glory or disaster.
And staying there…
