There are a lot of factors to being competitive and winning is only one of them. Many will argue that it’s the most important factor and that may be true at the highest of levels. However, other more important things to be competitive are your (or your child’s) ability to take input from coaches, instructors, team managers and quickly apply them. When you are shown a skill, can the driver quickly and consistently replicate that skill? I wouldn’t expect a beginner to adapt to this type of motorsport lifestyle just yet. Being patient with a beginning driver will be critical in the early stages. Putting too much pressure early on will take the “fun factor” out of the sport. Your child will let you know when they are ready when questions start coming in and they are trying new things to discover.
If you are a parent, you should know how your child will respond to learning new things. Make sure not to pressure your child into winning or beating other kids. When I was coaching my son, it was never about winning. Winning only became a byproduct of the combination of skills he learned and putting them together. Instead of winning, the key was always about learning how to be consistent on the race line and trying to improve his own time. Beating other kids has not been a factor until his racing became more competitive. When other kids started racing more aggressively, then building up his racecraft became important.
What is “racecraft”? I will go over that in more detail in a later blog but in a nutshell, race craft is utilizing your racing skills and strategies to improve a specific situation or multiple situations. It’s the experience you gain from different situations. Those situations could be a combination of taking different types of apexes, over-under or under-over passing, defensive inside lines, late braking, out-in-out, the snap-in, and many more. Again, these are all terms I will go over later on but the focus, for now, should be about seat time. This means actually going out onto the race track, getting some laps in and getting an understanding of how the kart will react under specific situations. So go out and enjoy your time at the track!