The Karting Kid "Fair or Foul"

Let's start from the point that there is no official offence as cheating. The words that need to learnt are eligible and not-eligible. No one likes to be called a cheat, especially when it's not true, however saying you suspect they have equipment that is not eligible is far less offensive, especially when nothing has been founded or proven.

There is a much misunderstood principle that most of the people entering our sport and winning are cheating, sorry I meant using ineligible equipment of course! Some of these rumours are spread just out of pure maliciousness, others are spread because some folk disbelieve that they could be beaten fairly and squarely, some are rumoured to be spread by dealers to potentially damage other dealers and finally a very minor percentage think they can use ineligible equipment (or cheat) and get away with it.

The ways that a competitor can fall foul of the rules is interesting, in that most that are caught with ineligible engines are done so because the tuner has genuinely made a mistake and over stretched the limits, although obviously on occasion some over stretch the limit with intent too. The ironic thing is many of the engines caught ineligible would be quicker if kept within the limits. The daft part is that there is little to be gained in performance the majority of the time over a well prepared properly tuned/fiched engine and so the risk of being caught by well prepared scrutineers outweighs the minimal advantage most would gain.

Much has been discussed on this site about fuel and once again there is little to gain without the modification of an engine to perform to the more powerful fuel. The worry of course is the dangerous effect of some of the additives used to gain little, if any performance benefit. Fortunately the advent of control fuels and GC testing has kept this nasty threat very much under control and long may it stay this way, as no one would like to see even the villains of the peace suffer illness from their own nasty additives, let alone innocent bystanders enjoying our fabulous hobby.

Recently tyres and their treatment have been under scrutiny and from the days when Francois Goldstein, 4 times World Champion realised that tyres were the be all and end all where performance was concerned, tyre performance has been key to winning races throughout the World. At World Championship level the technology in a completely legitimate way has been phenomenal with technicians from the major tyre companies spending fortunes to find the ultimate performance for a particular circuit on a particular day and event, the top Italian engine manufacturers and the World's best tuners realised that it was the tie up with a tyre manufacturer that was more important than the actual specifications of their engines. With this realisation the UK, after serious similar problems as described above, opted for the one tyre per class to try and alleviate the necessity for a tyre war and potential cheating. On the whole this system has served the UK well, despite efforts from some manufacturers to assert pressure through the Office of Fair Trading, therefore the system developed into sharing the classes amongst the major Tyre Importers. The only route now with a one make tyre class to enhance performance is through tyre treatment, which mainly always pass the primitive Shore hardness tester, fortunately however modern technology also assures that tyres can be laboratory tested for treatment of any kind, and whilst the way the officials make the test results stick is a different subject it is possible to stamp out treatment of tyres completely, although killing the rumours will be a much harder task.

Now that most classes allow hollow axles and many classes are either fiched or open, the chances of running ineligible chassis is becoming a rare occurrence, especially as the MSA often now allow modification to homolugation on safety grounds, which coincidentally is often a manufacturer realising a way to make their equipment perform faster.

Remember that 99.9% of the time the guy in front of you is there because they deserve to be and not because they are CHEATING, so don't 'tyre' of our great sport.

The Kid.
 

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