So I'll give you my perspective from someone who has raced karts in the past as a 15 year old, and has recently been considering getting back into the sport at 30.
The quality and accessibility of information about the numerous karting classes (even for someone who actually knows a bit about it) is very poor. The information that's there tends to be out of date and very difficult to navigate and make sense of.
The track specific sites (certainly up here in Scotland) are bad. WSKC is probably the best of a bad bunch, but I still can't work out if they run ICC on a regular basis without E-Mailing someone. Clubs surely have a responsibility to attract new drivers, but I don't see much sense of that up here.
This site is horrific in terms of usability (why is every forum response on a separate page?) and is well out of date in terms of style. The other karting forum is better, but I don't think it has the critical mass of this one.
With such a fragmented sport my view is that things either need greatly simplified or information to attract potential new competitors needs to be MUCH better presented. Is there any sort of UK karting body who might take this on - and I don't mean MSA, I mean someone focused on driving karting from the grass roots club level right up to international representation? If not, why not? Someone I can contact, say this is what I'm thinking, what should I do.
My example - I've decided I want to race some sort of two stroke - possibly gearbox, but £3-5k is a large investment without the opportunity to try one out. I've tried to organise a paid test session but to no avail. What do I do, where do I go from here? My best bet seems to be hanging around at an event in the hope that perhaps someone might let me have a shot, but even then in terms of insurance and track usage I doubt that's possible.
So in short - Poor access to fragmented information, complicated class structures, lack of testing sessions for newcomers, terrible community forum - Too many barriers to entry?
|
|