How to get super accurate with your steering

The best of the best don't miss apexes - why?

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Don’t turn your kart into a bucking bronco, learn how to tame the beast for ungodly speed

If there’s one thing karts hate, its mid-corner corrections on the steering. If you are heading towards an apex, and you have to steer out a bit to avoid a kerb, your kart is like:

Hey!! WTF are you doing???!! I was quite happy until you steered again you moron!

All racing vehicles hate this, but karts especially because they are very weird. For a kart to make a turn, you have to lift the inside rear wheel, sometimes up off the ground, sometimes imperceptibly so….

But whatever, if you have to correct your steering because you are heading for a kerb, then not only is this a slightly sub-optimum way to drive, like with a car, but in a kart its a disaster.

As soon as you steer away from the kerb, you slam the inside rear wheel down. The kart is no longer a cornering machine, but now is a straight-line-only machine, compelled by the solid rear axle to mercilessly drive you forwards.

Warning: Be prepared to be accused of cheating when you master this.

Now you are in trouble, so you have to forcibly lift the rear wheel up again with an extra large dose of steering input, that not only steers the kart, but physically lifts the inside rear wheel again. This extra dose of steering lock:

• creates extra drag,

• reduces corner speed,

• creates instability,

• wears your front tyre,

• kills exit speed,

• makes you slide and reduces traction.

You could even set off an oscillation in the kart, which has no dampers so can’t stop itself, and enter yourself into a whole world of hopping pain. Mainly rib pain, as the seat mountings try to puncture through your chest cavity!

Karts are very unforgiving, and drivers who don’t make mid-corner corrections are in fact driving a completely different machine to anyone else who does.

The kart that isn’t asked to make corrections will glide through corners gracefully, while the kart expected to adjust its trajectory mid-corner will behave like a bucking bronco, completely unpredictable and a nightmare to pilot.

The difference between how a kart behaves for an accurate driver vs one who has to make adjustments is so vast, they may as well not be described as similar machines.

And by corrections, I don’t mean wild adjustments on the wheel where one driver is smooth and the other is giving it full Tokyo drift. Fairly subtle adjustments can make a world of difference, so subtle that they are’t always perceptible from the outside.

How to adjust your driving style to make your kart beautifully compliant