Five seconds after climbing into a kart, I am entirely comfortable. My gloved hands find the steering wheel rim, my feet rest easily against the pedals and I am contented.
Five seconds after actually driving off, things are different: the vibration makes me feel sick and my glasses shake so much that my vision is blurred. It’s loud, it’s uncomfortable and I have no idea how I’m going to cope with half an hour of steering this heavy.
I’ve been karting on and off (mostly off) for nearly 40 years, sometimes in a rented kart, sometimes in my own one. But if the gap between stints has been anything more than a few months, I find the physicality of driving them takes serious reacquaintance.
No car, not a supercar nor a Caterham, drives like a kart, no matter how much a Mini Cooper’s drive mode suggests it does.
I was going to say that karting is like a palate-cleansing sorbet, resetting your expectations between driving dishes, but it’s too good for that, too appealing in its own right. It’s more like the control sample among thousands of experiments that add complexity.
Here there’s no power steering or torque vectoring and it isn’t a crossover. The suspension is in chassis flex and your bones. It’s driving distilled into its basic constituent parts and nothing more. And I find that irresistible.
It’s true even in the cheapest, easiest karts to come by: hire karts. Because they’re driven by reckless teenagers and hungover stag-do attendees, they’re the heaviest and most robust karts there are.
But still, if it doesn’t help you go or bounce off a barrier, a hire kart won’t be fitted with it. So even a kart made to accommodate anyone is only 2m long and 1.3m wide and weighs less than 150kg.
And when it has been abused, crashed and fixed with zip ties and hope, it will still be more immediate and communicative than any road car.
That purity is enviable. The controls – and this phrase isn’t often literally true but is here – couldn’t be simpler. You push your right foot to go, push your left foot to stop and turn the wheel to avoid things. That’s it. (Yes, big-money gearbox karts are more complex; don’t write in.)
And because the consequences of falling off are (usually) less severe than in a car, karting is the only time on track that I truly put meeting the scenery out of my mind.
As a result, the driving experience and the fun, while physically demanding, are unmatched. Karting is the purest form of driving; a genuine and, in my experience, unique driving freedom.
I don’t feel the same way about any car and as such I will be karting on and off (mostly off) for as long as my bones will permit it.
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