"Then grids would be high for most classes, and a true british champion?"
The sheer stupidity of this suggestion beggars belief.
While you are about it, why not insist that we all use Suffolk Punch engines, 1950's tyres and do away with not only safety aids but also any paramedics on site, then you would be back to the 'glory days' of myth and legend.
Let's get rid of the idea that bigger grids are automatically better racing. It just isn't true. All that happens is that as the prestige of winning your 'true british championship' goes up, driving standards deteriorate because one has to make all that valuable ground on lap one.
It is seen time and again in certain classes, to the extent that tracks all over the UK are making modifications to reduce the effect of the first corner crashes. (It doesn't reduce teh number of impacts much but does make them more survivable).
Alternatively, you play 'racing cars' and have the thoroughly boring time qualified events that ensures that 'the fast drivers' never have to drive through traffic and demonstrate any particular driving skill, such as the ability not to nerf anyone on the track in front of them. Watching the variety of karting championships on TV one is struck by just how often the same drivers are barging other drivers out of the way lap after lap, heat after heat. (And we get regular complaints on this forum about exactly the same thing).
The other effect of higher prestige racing is that the cost goes up. Not just the cost of non-compliant performance improvements, but the cost of being remotely competitive. We all know less than brilliant drivers who win because they kart every weekend and have experience of the tracks, or ride the kerbs because they can afford the chassis and most of us have met a driver who should or could be making a career out of their talent, but somehow never had the money or the luck / talent for gaining sponsorship.
What you quickly end up with is the need to hold qualifying rounds and then end up with a set of 'competition drivers' who might as well be on different karts and a bunch of other drivers, roughly divided into 'dodgem drivers' and those who have fun.
And, as we have heard from the 177 Masters, being a fun driver in a dodgem class just isn't amusing, so you generate another subclass, who run in a grid of their own.(and who also might as well be on a different kart).
Lastly, in order to have karting, you have to have traders, and as soons as traders make a living from karting, rather than just doing it for fun, then you get problems.
For example, with only five classes, who is allowed to import the tyres? Once a trader has a monopoly on the tyres, what do you think will happen to the prices?
As for running multi-engine classes, the price will just go up again. The advantage of Rotax was that they brought the price levels down or rather, they put the traders profit margins up, based on their total volume.
As has recently been shown, most of the difference between the various engines is down to the way the power is delivered, or teh tyres. For a long time Formula Blue was faster than TKM Extreme, but the simple change of tyre has made them roughly equal now. But what would happen if you ran them in the same class? Would you allow Blues currently on LeCont to run the Maxxis and be faster again or would you re-adjust the restrictors to make them all the same speed? And could one run either engine at the same meeting? At the moment it looks as if the TKM is faster at the end of the straight, the Blue quicker out of the corner, so it might be faster to run one engine at one track and the other at another. The Rotax powervalve means that the mid range acceleration out drags both other engines at the moment, but what would happen if you had to consider braking in the same way for the corners?
So now, to be competitive one would need examples of all three kinds of motor, to suit the type of track. That isn't going to be cheap.
But above all, it isn't the number of different classes that is making the difference. There just aren't the number of people taking part. I seem to remember an article in one of the karting mags that quoted some astonishing figures, that in the late 60's and 70's there were some 50,000 people involved in karting either driving or as spectators, that tracks attracted real spectators, not just the family of the drivers. Now I guess we struggle to get more than 15,000 involved, 5000 drivers and 10,000 others.
One reason might be found in the recent Government report, which found that many people today, particularly those influenced by video games and the internet, are unwilling to dedicate themselves to the time and effort required of serious achievement in sport. Why slave away for a year or more getting reasonably proficient on your kart...and have to wait your turn at the track....when you can be equally proficient in a few hours and have unlimited track time on your PC?
There are also a lot more risk averse parents, I know several mothers all of whom have said that no way is their child going to drive around in a kart. (But then they put the girls on a horse, twice as likely to produce injury as a motor bike and hundreds of times more likely than a kart).
Then there is the fact that everyone has been corporate karting and no-one believes that there is a significant difference.
And the fact that for many, taking up karting would be a choice between a package holiday in Turkey and weekends in the rain at Wigan (sorry Wigan, but it's been miserable every time I have been there).
Trying to buck the market for different classes of kart is a distraction, what we need is for people to get others down to the track and interested, and quite honestly, claiming that 3 different kinds of senior kart confuses people is an insult to them.
Lastly, there are an awful lot of people who just don't support their clubs, they see karting as something that they do at a weekend that magically happens. They need to get involved. Clay Pigeon for example has a monthly Open Day, and if everyone who went to Clay managed to get just one other person every year to go along to one of those days, the chances are that Clay's grids would be full in all classes.
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Could karting ever return to a maximum 5 classes? by 'willyblackshaw' (20 Mar 2010 @ 18:23)
