There is a little bit more to this. Conventional wisdom is that power to weight ration means everybody should be on the same weight. However for cadets there are two problems. Firstly as already discussed the smaller the child the heavier the kart, there has to be some disadvantage in this, yet is is never considered when setting weight limits. This is caused by the general obsession with moving up the moment you are a few grammes over weight, which in reality is simply not nessasary, see below.
The second problem is with the kart, however that lead is placed it is always going to reduce the centre of gravity compared with weight carried by the driver and also dampen the handling characteristics of the chassis to some extent. Thus a whole set of potential set up and handling problems have to be overcome.
At some point in the past I spent a considerable amount of time testing this in order to dispute an arbatory weight increase in a class we were competing in. From my slightly scientific results I reached the conclusion that 3kg of lead was an equivalent handicap to being 1kg overweight.
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