I wasn't always as quick

I first started out as many people do, in cadet karts at TeamSport before progressing to adult karts after a year of Race Academy.

Assuming you can drive a kart at least half decently, how do you improve your lap times?

It's all about seat time

Simply put; if you aren't racing, you can't improve. The more time you spend racing, the more chance you have to pickup how the track, karts, competitors and yourself change over time.

Let's take a look at my lap times from July 2022 to October 2024 from the app profile page.

There's a few spikes where I was having a really bad day/kart/or something - and the times start to go up towards the end of 2023. I can't really remember why, but let's take a closer look.

You can easily see a few things:

• I was moved up to faster (yay!) adult karts around December 2023
• There's an overall improvement in lap times over time
• Once you get your lap time down, it's hard to keep on shaving time off your lap

So let's talk rental karts.

Arrive and Drive / Rental karts are a great way to experience racing on a budget.

However, on any race you might have:

• a slower kart than the other competitors
• a kart that doesn't drive as you'd like it
• lots of yellow lights and not get many in laps in
• red light stoppage and not get many in laps in

So what do you do? Deal with it.

The best thing that I learnt was to drive what I was given. Slow kart? Learn to defend. Hard to steer? Take a different racing line. Fast kart? Attack through the field.