Rental Kart Championships & Endurance Races - Getting to a level playing field

When I entered my first rental kart race more than a decade ago, you got assigned a kart and as long as it didn’t break down you simply had to make the best of it, even if that kart was considerably slower than some of the others. Adding weight for lighter drivers was only done at some of the more ‘Pro’ races. Pitstops were not timed so less experienced teams/drivers inevitably would lose time compared to the ‘Pro’ teams. So when doing 6/8/12 hour races you could pretty much already know during qualifying what kind of result you could hope for. But then most people still participated for ‘fun’ 😊

Over the last few years there is clearly a drive for much more professionalism in the rental kart business, both from the drivers and from the Championship / Endurance Race organizers. Both the level and amount of Pro drivers has grown substantially and there seems to be also an influx from Private Kart drivers, especially on outdoor tracks. Many (semi-)Pro drivers are now organized in Kart Racing Teams, complete with sponsors and personalized team race suits to match. Professional communications equipment is almost mandatory during Endurance races to avoid any costly miscommunications. As strategy becomes ever more important during long endurance races, some even have a dedicated team manager / strategist. During the 24h of Spa / Francorchamps a whole ‘village’ was surrected with mobilhomes / caravan /tents / foodtrucks / late night party… But also with separate tents overlooking the circuit and laptops to monitor the race and adapt the strategy to any safety cars / FYC / rain / etc…

On the organizer side, I’m happy to report an ever increasing focus on creating a more equal playing field. Rental karts will never be fully equal, but there are a number of ways to compensate for the inequalities:

- First off, most if not all rental kart races now have a minimum weight rule. Typical exceptions are ‘fun’ races and competition for kids (age 8-11) and some junior races (age 12-18).

For Endurance races:

- the easiest and most used way to compensate for kart differences is to have a number of mandatory kart changes during the race. For shorter 2-3 hour races the number of changes is limited so you can still end up with slower karts compared than the competition but at least it is way better than just having to endure the same kart during the entire race.  For longer races, some implement a kart change every hour which is really good for equaling out kart differences but can be quite taxing on the marshals, especially if the number of teams participating is getting bigger.  That is likely one of the core reasons why during the 24h of Spa/Francorchamps there are only 7 kart changes during that time: with 64 teams participating, it takes almost a full hour to get through 1 kart change, and that is already with doing 3 in parallel.   The optimum I saw was a 24 hour race with 24 teams participating and a kart change every hour, which means each team drove every kart over the full 24 hours.  Can’t beat that.  

- another area where there is room to create a more equal playing field is Pitstops. Some of the Pro teams do stints of 3 hours or more to limit the number of pitstops they need to make.  As a less experienced team you’re likely to have to make more pitstops so unless there are some rules around minimum number of pitstops and a minimum time for each pitstop, it is very hard to compete on an equal basis. This is especially true when joining as a Junior Team where each team member needs to bring a lot of extra lead to satisfy the 80 or 85kg minimum weight.  As an example, during the 24h of Spa where driver changes were NOT timed, we lost 20-30 secs per pitstop doing the driver changes as we had to swap in and out 10-25 kg of lead each time, adjust pedals, etc… Take 20 secs per pitstop times 17 pitstops, that results in almost 6 full laps over 24h !!!   Yes we could have chosen to do longer stints as well and avoid 9 of these driver changes but that was not really an option with 5 juniors doing this for the first time.   Luckily most endurance races these days implement both a minimum number of pitstops as well as a minimum time for each pitstop.  Some even limit the length of a stint to maximum 1 hour which can also help the less experienced teams.

For spring races:

- have everyone do 4 or 5 sprint races, with different kart each time.  Drop the worst result.  That way there is a reasonable change you only get 1 ‘bad’ kart out of 4/5 races and can take that race as your drop result.  If somebody is lucky and gets all good karts, the benefit will be limited compared to someone getting 1 bad kart.  Ofcourse there is still a chance somebody gets 2 or more ‘bad’ karts. When I did some statistics on Formula Karting Belgium races beginning this year, I found one instance where somebody was so unlucky to get 4 bad karts, eventhough the majority of participants just got 0, 1 or 2 bad karts.

- pre-test and equalize the karts by adding weight to the faster ones and taking out the worst karts. This technique is implemented by Formula Karting, BNC and KWC (at least this year).  When done properly, it can significantly aid in getting an equal playing field and has shown it’s potential in many occasions. But don’t expect this to bring perfect equality.  One key challenge with rental karting is that the driver needs to adapt to the kart instead of being able to setup the kart for the driver as can be done in professional Rotax / IAME karting for example.  Each individual rental kart has it’s challenges: some have a bit less power, some may understeer, some might have bad brakes.  Real Pro drivers can adapt to these challenges, get the most out of the kart and still get a Top 3 result..  Less experienced drivers may simply see that same kart as another ‘bad’ one and finish outside the Top 10 even when they could make the Top 3 with a good kart.

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Sodi is offering an ‘EMS – Equality Management System’ feature for their SR4/SR5/Sport models.  It can be used to equalize power of the karts, but also as an alternative to adding lead weight for lighter drivers.  With the ‘EMS Racer’ option, you can virtually add weight in 2kg increments, up to a maximum of 30kg. It comes with a LCD screen showing the virtual weight added. For more info, see EMS Racer.  That said, I have yet to see this used anywhere.  Most kartings focus on their day to day customers and don’t want to spend extra on making their karts more equal for a race now and then.  Although some of the top kartings in Belgium do offer dedicated race karts for Pro drivers (e.g. Eupen, Worldkarts, FKI).

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