This week’s hot topic, by Mary-Ann Horley.
This isn’t a new finding I know but the amount of Seniors racing at club level is shockingly low. Senior Max grids hold up well at places like PFi and in the big championships but I’ve got to say at most clubs it’s barely more than single figures. There’s tons of Cadets, a few less Juniors and barely any Seniors. At Shenington this weekend there were 10 Senior Maxes running with six KGPs.
But bucking the trend at Shenington, one of the country’s biggest clubs, were the 37 Senior TKMs across the Extreme and Clubman classes. Clubman (regs here) was the bigger class and despite the compulsory second-hand tyres and old-fashioned chassis these drivers were far from bandits. There’s a massive battle shaping up this year between Josh Waring and David Brickley and there’s several Super One drivers racing in the class. Normal grown-up people don’t want to spend £5k on a kart and a grand racing in a bog standard club meeting, there’s far to much competition (arrive and drive karting, low end car racing) for that to be a mass market option. Cut the costs down to low four figures maximum on a kart and a few hundred quid on a meeting and suddenly it becomes a lot more attractive.
A TKM Clubman isn’t hard to work on, the karts are to the original simple TKM chassis format (although they don’t need to be homologated) and gearing is fixed so there’s less mechanicing to do. It’s not going to make much money for teams and traders but it keeps people coming into the sport and if the concept spreads it will keep the sport fresh and healthy.
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