... I noticed you raced in real life, so you've probably already got better feel than most playstation drivers. What did you used to race? Got anything tasty as a daily driver?
Are you sitting comfortably? Have you poured yourself a cup of tea?…
I started kart racing in my late 30s, after a wild and adrenaline-soaked life in the services (RAF) involving lots of martial arts, sequential aerobatics, and riding road-motorbikes extremely fast to within inches of death almost every time I put my lid on. Yes, yes, I know: very irresponsible of me and a danger to other road users …I’m hanging my head in shame.
I have no idea how I’m still alive; seriously - I cheated death every weekend and I really don’t deserve to be living right now. But I’ll take it, even though now in my 60s I have a string of health issues that might just do to me what my flying and biking hobbies failed to do so many years ago.
I started hire-karting after working for some motorsport clients and being invited along for some corporate days. I was not particularly good (at all) and kept blaming the disparity in the karts when others sailed past me on the straights. I had no idea that the drivers were fast down the straights because they’d taken the previous bend perfectly and were now carrying that speed increase to great effect to sail past me with ease.
Then I took part in some hire-kart championships but I still wasn’t any good. I am 6’2” tall and weigh far more than the whipper-snapper lightweight kids that used to romp away to the finish line thinking they were the next Ayrton Senna. I became despondent and very nearly quit karting, but one of my clients was a racing driver and he spent some time with me in a ProMax kart with a data recorder, and generally opened my eyes to the amount of technique involved in managing tyres and getting good lap times. It’s a science!
From there I was asked to join and manage an endurance hire-karting team, because I seem to have a knack for racing strategy and man-management (which comes from years as an NCO), which then led onto Owner/Driver endurance kart racing which is an entirely different league/planet to hire-karting, and which requires levels of fitness of an athlete (which I already had).
We raced our own Rotax Max karts for hours at a time on sticky sprint tyres, and it’s difficult to describe the strength and stamina required to withstand the G-forces involved for so long. My racing driver client told me that between 2-stroke karting and Formula One, no other racing series (at the time) involved the same toll of G-forces on the body.
Oh, and O/D karting involves adding weights to the kart to reach a set threshold, so provided one keeps oneself reasonably trim, one can race without any disadvantage of size …what an eye-opener that was! I studied books about racing, practiced a lot, and slowly became a better racer and did well in karting. I travelled the country and had literally hundreds of trophies with which to clutter up my house.
At age 50 I had to undergo major spine surgery (too much knock-down karate) which put paid to my racing days. But I’m back now (in my 60s) with my VR headset in one hand and a copy of GT7 in the other, looking to recover whatever racing thrills I can find in the virtual world.
Trail-braking is new to me as a kart only has brakes on its fixed rear axle. One needs to lift the inside wheel of a kart off the deck to rotate it round hairpins (because of the fixed rear axle), so a race-kart corners completely differently to a car. Just about the only transferrable driving skills between Rotax-Max karting and GT7 is handling the power and feeling the tyres when on the limit.
A Rotax-Max kart will spin-out every time if you floor the throttle in a bend. Unlike a hire-kart, it has lots of piston-screaming power, so you need to learn how to be gentle through the bends and how to feed the power in gradually ...just like driving a GT3 or FS car in GT7 without any traction control. Basically, you steer the kart with the throttle and whilst you can’t do this in most GT7 cars because they snap-out too violently, except for maybe the Radical (my favourite kart-like GT7 car), it does give me an edge, I think, when it comes to handling the bigger cars. It also helps when exiting fast bends because the technique there is the same for Rotax-Max karting as for GT7 racing: control the line of your exit with the throttle so that you kiss the kerb to use the whole width of the track without digging the tyres in (which loses speed).
But where O/D karting definitely has transferable skills is in the area of race-craft, which is exactly the same for all levels of motorsport, which is why all F1 drivers start out in 2-stroke karts. Knowing when to dive in on the brakes and when to have patience is a skill. Being able to anticipate the driver in front so that you can line up the overtake two or three bends in advance is a skill. Being patient enough to lull the other driver into a particular line is a skill. And so is learning how to overtake on the very edge whilst also giving the other driver room to stay on the track.
As racers, we would all share the same space in parc ferme after the race. We were all fighting-fit, testosterone-fuelled grown men, so you don’t want to go punting them off into the tyres, leaving them with a bill for thousands (karting is not cheap at the sharp end) just because you took a reckless chance at a late lunge. Accidents happen due to miscalculations but you need to be able to genuinely hold your hands up and say sorry; I cocked up! …and then buy the beers. If you get a good rep, others repay that rep in kind, and it’s why I always raced wearing a bright yellow race suit sitting in a bright yellow kart …so that the driver in front knew who was behind.
Racecraft takes years to learn and there’s nothing better than racing wheel-to-wheel, side-by-side through a long series of bends with a fellow clean racer, each giving the other room and respect, even though your open wheels are dangerously millimetres apart at eye-watering speeds. This is what I would dearly love to rediscover in the VR world of GT7. I am undoubtedly going to be sorely disappointed once I get online (I tried it in GT6 and know what’s out there), but I’m hoping that once I get good enough in GT7, and provided age has not depleted my racing skills (a distinct possibility), that I might be able to recapture at least some of the camaraderie of my karting days, even if it is all virtual. Anyone up for giving it a go?
In terms of daily rides: I mainly hung off the side of bikes for my thrills but I’ve always had reasonably fast cars. I had a Signal Yellow RS2000 in the early 80’s, when that car was ‘the car’ to have. I currently drive a 2 litre GLA with extra-low AMG suspension. It’s not a rocket-ship but spin up the turbo, knock it into ‘paddle mode’ and it doesn’t hang about! Which reminds me of a story to finish this way-too-long tome…
I’ve been spending so much time in VR lately, learning to ride every kerb in order to maximise my exit speeds (which you don’t do in real endurance racing if you want the car to last more than twenty minutes), that when driving my GLA last week and overtaking a sloooooow car whilst exiting a roundabout on a dual-carriageway, without thinking I automatically rode the sloped exit kerb. Road exit kerbs are sloped but only just; not near-flat like a race circuit. Needless to say, the car made it back down onto the road (I have very quick reactions) but with a bit of a wake-up call: “Oy, you dozy git; you’re not in a GT3 car now!” Note to self: try to separate real life from GT7 in VR!
…well you did ask! 🙄 😆
