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So a bit more detail on my thinking/experience that I went through when deciding on TKM just over a year ago, in case it helps.
I dismissed Rotax pretty quickly for a number of reasons. The first was the cost to be competitive. There seemed to be such variety in engine performance and to get one of the better ones you'd have to sell a fair few body parts and probably still have to take out a loan! The other reason was the driving standards that I witnessed over a couple of weekend meetings at Whilton. One of the weekends there wasn't a single heat that wasn't red flagged at least once and most of them were red flagged at least twice. Accompanying this was the attitude of certain drivers that seemed to be "oh well my dad will just pay to get it fixed". One lad actually said this to me after bending his kart for the 4th time during the weekend !
So Rotax was out. X30 was still quite new at the time and it was certainly being Hyp'd up big time by everyone as the answer to everything. For me at the time it was still not proven enough whereas of course its now had another year, during which the grids are growing at most tracks. What has become clear is that cost wise, it is more expensive to run as engines are being rebuilt more often than originally predicted and people are using new tyres at every race meeting. This 'more expensive' has been confirmed by people who had tried to persuade us to go X30 originally and have since discovered/admitted it is more pricey to run. Also a lot of Rotax drivers have moved up to X30 so, it remains to be seen what the driving standard are like (I haven't watched enough to know). Having said all that, buying an engine new gets you something with a lot more parity than in Rotax which will be competitive. I've heard rumours there are some different batches of engines that rev higher than others but, I've no idea if this is true or not.
In the end we went TKM. The down side of this decision is the more limited grids and certainly we have to travel further to race than we used to. At the TKM festival in 2014 I wondered around and spoke to lots of drivers and their dads, and the overriding impression I got was of a really friendly bunch, many of whom were Dad/Kid teams who were cost conscious and whose kids understood this and looked after the equipment (driving accordingly). You could start in TKM at a younger age and the restrictors allowed there to be parity across a wide age range. It was the people that won me over first and foremost and this has been born out over this years racing. You only have to visit the Formula TKM Owners group on Facebook to get a sense of the Community and how friendly it is.
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Moving up, TKM or mini max by 'RichW' (06 Dec 2015 @ 16:45)
