Overtaking in Karting is a Hardcore Battle of Wills

Not a chance to show off how considerate you are!

Remember to listen to the audio, I always say more there than is written here!

Last week I started with a bit of a rant about the plastics on karts, leading on to how to hold your nerve and make overtaking happen in a hard but fair manner.

This week, I want to go into how plastics on karts have led into more hard but fair driving, that is getting blamed for all the troubles in F1.

“They learned that in karting”
Every whiny F1 pundit

I’m talking about running drivers wide who you have overtaken - but they don’t know when they are beaten so you continue to run wide to the exit. Sometimes the driver who you overtook drives off the track.

In F1-speak they call it crowding and they are having a nightmare trying to define the exact rules of overtaking, in order to penalise what is proper fair and strong overtaking.

As soon as they opened the Pandora’s box of ‘trying to codify overtaking’ they really messed up.

That’s because overtaking is not the exercise in execution of a set of regulations where one driver swaps positions with another. No it’s this:

Overtaking is a battle of wills, where the strongest will prevails. And where those wills are equal, then something happens - called a crash.

A steward who has a feel for racing has the impossible task of making a decision on dishing out penalties.

It is an impossible task, because overtaking involves far too many invisible variables. So the decisions are usually wrong. But that’s tough shit.

Because…

Those penalties need to exist fairly and unfairly, served by a judge who can’t get it right, in order to create a deterrent to blatant take-outs. That’s the only real purpose they serve, and not righteous retribution and justice - justice can’t really exist in racing.

But what we have in karting is still pretty cool when it comes to overtaking and decisions from stewards.

Compared to F1 etc, we still have stewards who make their own decisions based on their very limited chances to observe what happened.

That allows for drivers to race hard but fair and not be subjected to impossible to follow rules where some dork stipulates exactly what part of a kart needs to be level with another, at a particular point in time and space that never actually plays out in reality.

In other words we need to keep the system of unreliable stewards trying their best in an impossible situation so they have to resort to their own judgement. The alternative is an invitation to the horrors of bureaucrats thinking they can define overtaking and making drivers follow dumb rules and abandoning their instincts.

Here’s the most important stewarding principle that means karting is the superior racing activity:

Staying on the Outside of Another Driver is Weak, Dangerous and Your Problem

If you understand this principle you can benefit massively in two ways as a driver

1. You will make more successful overtaking moves where you keep the position, and sometimes make a gap as a bonus.

2. You won’t find yourself pushed out on to the grass, and know when to concede a corner without losing any unnecessary time.

How to Treat a Driver Who Stays on Your Outside

When you overtake a driver, that driver has to realise for themselves when to give up the position. It is not for you to help them maintain their position.

This means that if you are ahead, which you really must be by virtue of having the faster inside line, then you run to the normal exit point. The fact is, you shouldn’t have much choice, because physics will take you there.

If you run to the normal exit point, and it’s clear you are going there, your opponent, if gifted with the most basic of driving intelligence, will lift and tuck in behind you.

If NOT, then they are driving themselves off the track, which is none of your business, even if that means they try to use contact to stay on the outside. You must not concede to their imbecilic ignorance of physics, but instead remain steadfast in holding your vastly superior position and continue to use the racing line.

Stay ahead on the inside and keep the right to run out wide

If you are a sympathetic person, which I have no problem with, then what you are doing is generously bestowing a basic lesson to that driver from which they benefit greatly - i.e. messing around trying to hang on to a pathetically weak track position is very bad for them.

If however, you are over-generous with racing room (perhaps from watching too much F1 - an inferior form of racing) and you lift a bit at the apex, possibly from feeling like you might touch your opponent, then they have a reasonable chance of staying on your outside, level with you.

Now you have a problem...

If you lift because you feel squeezed you will lose the rights to run wide

You are now getting into the territory of not being clearly enough ahead that they must concede.

Considering you were a bit weak at the apex, they may as well hang on, you are unlikely to go hard core and run them off now.

So, I would say in this position you don’t deserve the advantage. You lost the rights to go pod to pod and will find yourself on a dodgy line!

Key Takeaways

1. If you’re ahead on the inside, you run to the normal exit point. That’s the racing line, your right.

2. If they stay on your outside, that’s their problem. They’ll either lift and tuck in, or drive off the track.

3. Don’t lift out of sympathy. If you do, you lose the right to run wide.

4. Staying outside is weak and dangerous. Know when to give up the corner.

5. Hard but fair overtaking means using physics and judgement

How far alongside you need to be is all about your own judgement and instinct.

Thanks for reading,

Terence