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What is Superkarting ? Think back to your childhood ... back to your home-made billy-kart, a few pieces of 4x2 which was powered by gravity and a mate or two - throw in some wacky steering, some Victa lawn mower wheels and Fred Flintstone brakes. You imagined you were Fangio, Stewart, Senna as you rolled down the driveway. It was heaps of fun eh? Now take the concept to the other extreme ... you’ve got a professionally manufactured Chrome-Moly chassis, sticky racing slicks, 6-speed true-sequential shift racing bike engine, four-wheel disc brakes, and wings. Now you have a recipe for the ultimate karting experience! Today’s Superkarts owe their heritage to decades of dedicated research by manufacturers and teams all over the world, pushing chassis, aero, tyre and engine design to the limits in a similar way to how Formula One works ... without the mega-dollar budget. Because of the awesome speeds these machines are capable of, they are only raced on large road-race circuits – places like Eastern Creek, Phillip Island, Mallala, Silverstone, Laguna Seca, Hockenheim ... Yes, the same tracks all the top race drivers around the world race at. So picture this. You’re sitting in your grid position, amongst 50 other karts, and the Red Light is ON. Bringing the tacho up to 13,000rpm and your heart is beating just as fast as the adrenaline surges through your arteries, and then the lights go out ... it’s time to launch this little rocket! You’ve fired off the line like a slingshot, gotten to about 100kph in 3 seconds, and now you give the gear stick a nudge into 2nd gear. The tacho screams its way back to 13,000 and you just keep nudging that gearstick, 3 ... 4 ... 5 ... 6 ... brake hard. NO ... HARDER!! You’ve brought this monster down from 230kph to just 87kph in the blink of an eye (but a lot heartbeats) and you about to guide this missile through a hard 2.5G corner. With your neck muscles struggling to keep your helmet attached to your body, you’re back on the throttle as you hurtle out of the corner in 2nd gear, the speed and acceleration building just like a few seconds ago as you grab 3rd, 4th ... Repeat over and over and over again. Some corners are “slow”, you take them at about 90kph, other corners are “fast” and you can attack them flat out, but the sensation is always the same. Woo Hoo! Sound more like the sort of thing you wanted to do as a kid with that billycart? If not, stop reading now. But if you can imagine yourself doing this for the sheer heck of it, because you can, because it’s the cheapest entry into circuit racing, because there are no more excuses, then read find out about getting started. |
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