I don’t know whether you’ve tried racing a motorised go-kart but it’s a hairy experience. Okay, so a top speed of 35mph doesn’t sound that fast but when you’re only inches from the ground in a very small machine with a petrol tank between your knees you feel very exposed. And when the earringed Italian a foot from your rear bumper trying to overtake is a Formula One racing driver and former world karting champion it gets pretty intense.
The driver was none other than Vitantonio “Tonio” Liuzzi, 24-year-old heart-throb and rising star of F1. He was pressuring me at every corner of this race — the opening event in a tournament organised by Red Bull to find Britain’s best amateur kart racer.
Nerve-racking it may be but karting is about as far from the glamour of F1 racing as you can imagine. The venue was the NEC in Birmingham and even though the circuit was indoors the surface was slippery. Wrestling the small kart around sharp bends was like trying to pull a fat man out of a swimming pool. To make it worse, the Tannoys were blaring something about the driver of kart No 7 being the long-suffering wife of Jeremy Clarkson.
Tonio is very, very fast and clearly has the makings of a future F1 champion. I say that because he gives no quarter and seemed determined to blow me into the weeds.
During the practice lap he did give me some kindly tips on my racing line and told me I should take the bends wider. Now, in the race proper, I could see he could afford to be generous with his advice. I was in front of him only because he was trying to lap me, and for the sake of every plucky amateur who has entered a race where the odds are stacked against them, I was determined to stay ahead.
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Kart racing is a fast-growing sport. For many contestants it’s deadly serious as well as an accepted route into F1. Michael Schumacher, David Coulthard and Jenson Button all started their driving careers in karts. Tonio was world karting champion in 2001 and now drives for the Scuderia Toro Rosso F1 team. You need lightning reflexes, stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness. Jeremy would say I had plenty of the latter and I certainly needed it to thwart Tonio’s repeated attempts to zoom up the inside and take the chequered flag.
Tonio had agreed to join the race against a small field of autosport enthusiasts, including me. Before the start, technicians adjusted my seat so my feet were in the right place, and assured me that, yes, I’d be quite safe without a seatbelt: apparently nobody wears a seatbelt in a kart. At least I think that’s what they said because the noise was deafening.
I’d already had the pre-race briefing, which all the male competitors took very seriously. They didn’t crack jokes or giggle during the safety talk, not even during the How To Put On A Pair Of Gloves section. There were just two other women but both seemed unnervingly well organised; they had their own racing suits. I’d come in my jeans and had to borrow an oversized set of what looked like farmer’s overalls from the kart track.
One of the other women was Louise Goodman, from the ITV F1 team. Even if I did not recognise her I would have known this because she had “ITV F1 Sport” displayed on her left buttock.
We were introduced to Tonio, who began racing karts at the age of 10. In keeping with the glamorous image of the racing world he had just stepped straight off the plane to be with us. He wore the team overalls, a baseball cap, various bits of uncomfortable looking skin-piercing jewellery and a woollen scarf rakishly tossed over his shoulder. You would wear a scarf for an indoor kart race, wouldn’t you? “I love kart racing,” he told us in a brief press conference. “It was always my ambition to be world champion.”
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Now let me lay before you my own kart racing credentials. Some 13 years ago, as part of my hen night, I raced against a certain Jeremy Clarkson. He won and one day I’ll forgive him. Apart from that I drive a Lotus Elise, I have taken part in endurance rallying, and I’ve ridden a motorbike for years, although I’ve reached an age where I’m beginning to wonder about the bike. Not much to put up against a former world champion, I suppose, but it’s all I had.
If Jeremy were doing this, this is the moment when he would stretch back confidently from the wheel and give you all the technical details. He would tell you that this is a Sodikart with a Honda 270cc engine that goes from 0-30mph in about 3sec. It has a top speed on the track of about 35mph but apparently can reach 70mph on a long, straight road. He might also remark that it’s low and flat and gives you the vague feeling that you’re sitting in Doctor Who’s Flymo.
In fact, kart racing may have had its origins in the lawnmower world. There are two theories about how it began. One says it was brought to Britain by American servicemen during the second world war. The other says the first kart was built in Los Angeles in 1956 from a two-stroke engine and a lawnmower clutch. That would make 2006 the 50th anniversary of the sport.
Karting first became popular in Britain in the mid-1980s, when two enthusiasts set up a track in a disused bus garage in London. Now there are around 100 tracks across the country, and the event I was competing in marked the launch of the Red Bull Track Attack contest to find the best non-pro kart racer.
So could it be me? No. I quickly found myself in seventh place, and it was the corners that did for me. Tonio was third and battling for second. I was furiously trying to keep my place while the commentator’s voice got more urgent (“mmrrh mmrrh, holding on to seventh place, mmrh mmrh, long-suffering partner, mmrh Jeremy Clarkson”).
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I was overtaken in the hectic jostling for position but then miraculously I managed to squeeze past somebody else and so ended up seventh overall out of a field of . . . well, let’s just say more than seven. More important, my best lap time was only 1.23sec behind Tonio, ex-world champion. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, that’s a giant gap in motor racing terms but a small amount in a friendly kart race.
The winner was a man called Henry who later interviewed Tonio for his internet radio station, and Tonio — despite being beaten — generously praised his performance. You see, we top kart racers are a very polite bunch.