"You are insane and this is amazing but I have no arms left." I was slumped in his support van, covered in sweat. "Think more," Gidley said, after my first session. Or fall over, as it were, climbing out of the kart. As Whitman said, I and this mystery, here we stand. Maybe, if I had tried this in middle school, I would've sold my shoes for another hit and not spent a life chasing adjectives. Maybe I put two wheels in the dirt on exit once, my body a noodle, unable to steer anywhere else. Sometimes while yelling "Argfb!" in your helmet, because your muscles are Kleenex in a bowl of soup. Sometimes you do this while backing the kart into a corner.
They also occasionally have you steering with one hand, wrestling the wheel with your left shoulder, because the gearing is so closely stacked, your right hand doesn't have time to leave the lever.
Shifters change gear through a lever at your right knee-pull for up, push for down. "Normal" karts have one-speed drivelines, so your hands never leave the wheel. Only in this case, there's no door, just you, lifting your own weight, jacking the frame around a cartoonishly angled kingpin. You turn it with your upper body, like the guys in submarine movies who crank the wheel to close a door. A kart's wheel is about as far away as the screen and at roughly the same angle. Recall the last time you had a laptop in your lap. You don't turn if you're a shambly writer type with a torso like Kansas covered in pudding. With the wrong setup, you don't turn, period. With the right setup, you turn a kart through frame stiffness, lifting the inside rear tire. Sometimes while yelling "Argfb!" because your muscles are Kleenex in a bowl of soup. "Why not the fastest thing? If someone lets you drive an F1 car, who says no?" First time, track I'd never seen, too much to process.
I asked Gidley why he'd make a kart virgin drink from the firehose. Indoor kart is to shifter as lobotomized spaniel is to Einstein.
Plus maybe 10 hp if you're lucky, with the rock-hard tires bolted to a frame weighing more than the moon. Perspective: Perhaps you've rented an indoor kart at one of those warehouse places. Acceleration is violent, brutal, and other words you might use to describe a mob killing. The right corner can prompt more then 3.0g's of grip–the sudden ramp up of load has been known to produce chest injuries–because shifters have a lot of tire for their weight. There's no harness, and the seat is tight enough to keep you in. This is important because karts are physically abusive. He told me to climb in.Īt 180 pounds and Zero muscle, my body is basically rails and a stomach. Five-speed sequential gearbox, 220 pounds, $12,000-$15,000 with engine.
When I got there, he told me that the sport's apex-the shifter kart-was the most demanding driver training short of renting an Indycar.Īfter our shoot, Gidley rolled out a 250cc, four-stroke, 36-hp Aluminos shifter. Gidley suggested we meet at the kart track at Sonoma Raceway, north of San Francisco.
He's spent the last few years on medical hiatus, coaching drivers and skippering a charter sailboat in the Bay Area. He drove turbo Champ cars for Chip Ganassi, then raced prototypes until a bad accident at Daytona in 2014. Age and lack of focus meant I missed the ladder that's lifted everyone from Jeff Gordon to Lewis Hamilton. I found road racing in college, through cheap sedans.
Most pro drivers start racing as children, in karts. And because I had never driven a race kart, he agreed to help me try. Gidley offered to show us how one worked. Karts don't use differentials or traditional dampers, so their function seemed like hoo-doo. Gidley has written several books on the sport I read one and got curious. Last month, I began researching our latest Lost Art, on the magic of karts. Two: Vaporize money, eat beans for weeks.) (One: Discover ridiculous thing and get hurt doing it. Then I bruised a rib and decided to start buying stuff, which is basically the story of my life. WHEN WE NEEDED A KART SHOP, I called Memo Gidley.