Answer The Questions! (part 1)
| by Mark Wicks | 16 August 2015 |
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Karting Australia (AKA) karters are now most of the way through the first year of the ‘new look’ sport, post Whole of Sport Review.
New engines, new state championship and nationals format, plus many other things, means the sport has experienced a huge shakeup for 2015.
The governing body is yet to publish any participation rate data, or information about new licence numbers. Maybe we might see this after end of year?
However, I think a very general statement that entry numbers are down at most clubs, as is the number of new karters signing up to race, would be pretty accurate.
I think ONE of the reasons for the low uptake of the sport at the moment is simply lack of a second hand market in the categories that now have new engines – Cadet 9 and 12, plus all the National and Clubman classes.
For these classes, which were once the foundation categories for the sport, the situation will only change when current owners of KA100 and Mini Rok engines exit karting (or their class) and sell up (or the Yamaha’s receive some sort of performance boost to obtain parity – highly unlikely).
Let’s face it, a significant number of people get into the sport by purchasing inexpensive second hand equipment.
If a budding racer has done their research, they’re not going to buy a second hand kart fitted with a Yamaha engine because there is simply no way they can be competitive.
The new generation engines are at a price point the green ‘newbie’ is wishing to acquire the entire kart! Senior drivers at least have the choice of buying a used TaG125 package and gridding up in the TaG-R fields.
Anyway, enough rant...
This is the first of a series of polls that are planned to run over the coming days and weeks.
The intention is to cover all sorts of random questions and issues that could be of relevance to any competition karter - from club level amateur to national level pro racer.
This is your opportunity to have your say! There are plenty more questions coming, so tune in each day to see if the topic is of interest to you.
- If you’ve got a question you’d like to put to the karting public, email it through (info@kartsportnews.com) and we’ll see what we can do. If you wish to pass additional comment on today’s question, email that as well.
See you at the track,
Mark Wicks
