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(63 votes) Published: Jun 02, 2000 12:00 a.m. Viewed 1361 times
Whether it was by dogged determination, or pure luck, you’ve discovered the sport of kart racing. Looks pretty good to you, too. Real racing. Wheel-to-wheel competition. The thrill of victory, and hopefully, not the agony of defeat.
Before you actually get started, you go to a local kart track and buy a pit pass. As you tour the pits in search of advice on getting started, you hear conversations about tire compounds, flex length, pipe-of-the-month, stagger, and many other topics dear to a racer’s heart. You’ll get all kinds of advice and opinions on what chassis you should get, what class you should run, who the best engine builder is, but I seriously doubt that you will get one word of advice on safety equipment. Well, maybe you will, but it won’t be much more than ’Oh, by the way you’ll net to get a helmet’.
As much as we hate to admit it, there is the ’agony of defeat’ in kart racing. Like that Russian ski-jumper in the old Wide World of Sports intro, kart racers do occasionally crash and burn! Not only do we not like to admit it to outsiders and ’newbies’, we don’t even like to admit to ourselves most of the time. If I thought about all the possible consequences of my son flipping his sprint enduro at 80 mph, I probably wouldn’t even let him out on the track! Of course, if I sat down and thought of everything in the world that could happen to him, I probably wouldn’t let him get out of bed in the morning!
Racers do indeed have a tendency to ignore the potentially dangerous aspects of the sport. Back in the mid-60’s a salesman/mechanic/handyman at a local motorcycle shop took a liking to me. He taught me some of the intricacies of setting a bike up for short track racing. I couldn’t help but notice from the first time we had meet that he walked with a horrendous limp, kinda like the hunch back of Notre Dame. Like the typical tactful teenager I was, I commented to one of the mechanics one day, ’Boy, it’s too bad Larry can’t race. As much as he knows, I’d bet he would be really good!’. The mechanic stopped what he was doing and looked me right in the eye, then said, ’Kid, how do you think he got that way?’.
Running on a 1/2 mile fairgrounds flat track, Larry lost the back-end and slid-out, like so many flattrackers before and after him. Only this time, Larry went into the wood wall surrounding the track and didn’t get back up. He had shattered his thigh and hip. I never looked at Larry the same again, in fact, as much as I hate to admit it, I felt uncomfortable around him a lot of the time. At the age of 14 or 15, I was invincible and couldn’t accept that what I dearly loved to do could possibly bend, fold, spindle and mutilate me. Not me, maybe the other guy, maybe an old man like Larry (he must have been near 30!), but not me!
Well we are all the other guy to somebody and sooner or later we, or someone we know, are going to crash and burn, big-time! So there is the first lesson of karting safety. Sooner or later we are all going to crash. Hopefully, we’ll all walk away with nothing more than a few bruises. However, every year that I have been involved in this sport, I have heard of someone being killed in a racing incident. So admit it, accept it, and prepare for it , this can be a dangerous sport. Now I’m not trying to scare any one off, but as much thought as you put in preparing your kart should be put in preparing yourself!
Let’s start off with the one obvious piece of safety that EVERYBODY knows they need, a helmet. In the US most racing organizations require a Snell-approved helmet and specify the minimal year of approval, such as Snell-90, or Snell-95. Now, I know some of you may have a beautiful, expensive paint job on your Snell-90 helmet and your not going to want to replace it when they change the rule to a Snell-95 rating. Seems pretty stupid to throw out what looks to be a perfectly good helmet, doesn’t it? Well, have you seen what salt and water does to a car body? They don’t call the Great Lakes region up here the ’rust belt’ for no reason! Every time you go out there and work up a good sweat, you’re soaking the inside of that helmet with salt and water! You may not realize it but, depending on how much you race, after a year or two that liner may be starting to ’rust out’. So even though you may or may not have to change helmets every couple of years to meet new standards, you should either replace the whole helmet, or at least have it relined every couple of years.
So now you know you need a Snell helmet, but what kind? Do you need a carbon fiber or kevlar helmet? It won’t hurt anything but your pocket book if thats the kind of helmet you want, but the fiberglass models will provide adequate protection. What about those other ratings you may see on the helmet tag, such as Snell SA-95 or Snell M-95. They are both OK for kart racing. The S-series are autoracing rated helmets. Basically they are designed around the intent that the wearer will be in a vehicle and will be bouncing his head off objects in the vehicle. The M-series are designed for motorcycle use, where the rider is not contained and will most likely be bouncing off various bits and pieces of mother nature! It basically has to do with differences in the strength/duration of the impacting forces. In reality, since most karting flips involve impacts more similar to those of the motorcycle variety, I suppose the Snell-M rating would be the more appropriate rating for karters, though both are acceptable.
Even more important than whether a helmet is Snell-SA or M-rated, or really even more important than if it is even Snell or DOT approved, is how the helmet fits. A Snell approved carbon fiber helmet isn’t much better than having a brick strapped to your head if it doesn’t fit properly!! The problem of proper fit is especially noticeable in the rookie classes (that’s the 8-12 year olds for you newbies). You all know what I mean. You see the kid coming down the straight and he turns to check on his competitor coming up behind him. From the movement of his arms and shoulders you know he’s turned his head, but the helmet is still pointing straight forward! Or the kid cuts a corner and as he goes over the speed bumps, that helmet is bouncing up and down like one of those old stupid animals people used to put in the back window of their cars!. My favorite was this one little guy I was watching one day. Every time the kid braked for a corner, his hand went up to his face. At first I thought maybe he just didn’t want to see what he might be getting into, but then, after watching him pull into the pits and come to a stop, I realized what he had been doing. He was pushing the helmet back up so he could see where he was going! Every time the poor little guy hit the brakes, the helmet flopped down over his eyes!
So parents, go ahead and buy a driving suit that junior can grow into next year, but DON’T get junior a helmet thinking they’ll grow into it. You want a snug fitting helmet. Flip up the face shield and try to stick your finger between the cheek pads and junior. You shouldn’t be able to get you finger in there very easily. Grab the helmet right in front of junior’s mouth and move it side-to-side. If it moves much more than than an inch sideways before junior’s head starts to move with it , than it may be a little on the loose side. Pull that face bar up and down and junior’s head should follow very shortly thereafter. If you move it up or down and either way results in junior’s line of vision being blocked, put that one back and try again. From personal experience, a good rule of thumb is that if junior doesn’t whine and complain every time you take his helmet of, then it’s probably too loose!!
There is one last thing to mention about helmets. Once that helmet has served its purpose by saving your head in a crash, either retire it with honors or have it rebuilt. DON’T EVER USE A HELMET THAT HAS HAD EVEN THE SLIGHTEST DAMAGE IN A CRASH!! Many of the major helmet manufacturers will examine and repair a helmet if it is still salvageble.
The next item to consider is a neck collar. Many racing organizations require this, except for lay-down enduro kart classes. Why do you need a neck collar? Well, take one of those plastic drinking straws that have that flexible section in the middle and stick a ping pong ball on the end of it. Now whip it back and forth, watching that flexing section. Now replace that ping pong ball with a tennis ball and repeat. Watch that flexible section whip around now! That’s what your head will be like when your wearing a helmet and really get nailed from behind! Your flexible straw, AKA, your neck, only has a limited range of motion before things start to tear and break. Fortunately that range of motion does tolerate a fair degree of movement.
The neck collar functions to restrict the range of motion to a safe limit. Most importantly; it limits hyperextension , or the bending backwards of the neck. The classic hyperextension injury that most of us are familiar with is a favorite among plaintiffs attorneys, the classic whiplash case. While this maybe the most typical type of neck injury, the collar, by restricting movement in all planes of motion, will also help prevent other potentially serious neck injuries. Though not that common, severe, rapid hyperflexion (forward bending) can result in compression fractures of the bodies of the vertebrae in the neck and other injuries to structures in the neck. Like I have said before, break your arm or crack a rib and you can walk away from a crash, break your leg and you can usually limp away, but break your neck, and they carry you away! So if you’re out there on the track and your neck collar comes of don’t get mad at the flagman/race director if he black flags you, he may have just saved your neck...literally!!
Now unless you’re racing in a nudist colony, your going to need to wear something while you’re out there in front of the public displaying your championship form, I mean your driving skills! There are numerous articles out there somewhere that will show comparative performance of various materials used in driving suits for those of you scientific types. However, as an old motorcycle racer, I have conducted hundreds of independent, uncontrolled studies of the abrasion resistance of various materials. I have also scraped and dug enough gravel out of patients to probably resurface my gravel driveway!
In general, you can place materials in three different classes. Class 1, anything you would wear someplace other than a race track! Sweat pants, nylon jogging pants, and yes ,even jeans The reason you wear these things at places other than a race track is because that is where they belong! While a good heavy pair of jeans offer more protection than any other form of street clothes, they still are not as effective as a good driving suit.
Class 2 would be your driving suits made of nylon or vinyl. These materials are more abrasive resistant than Class 1 clothing and as a bonus your going to look like a real racer, too! While testing may show some differences in the various types of nylons, in practical applications, they are all close enough to be considered in one class. Besides the ’karting’ suits, many motocross pants and motorcycle jackets are made out of this type of material as they also are concerned with rapid, non-vehicular horizontal movement across the face of the earth!
The Class 3 apparel contains only one material, leather. Preferably competition weight/grade leather. There is nothing better for asphalt body surfing than a real, competition grade leather driving suit. Did you ever see Wayne Rainey, Eddie Lawson, or Kenny Roberts running their GP bikes wearing anything other than full leathers? If there was anything better, don’t you think every GP motorcycle rider would be wearing it? Naturally, though, there is a downside to full leathers. They may cost you as much as a year old chassis! They are also a little stiffer and hotter that some of the nylon suits. But if it is maximum protection you want, it’s the way to go!
A couple of more points about driving suits. Drag Racing/Stock car suits should be examined very carefully. Some of these are Proban suits, or otherwise, fire-resistant COTTON. Do you want to slide across the track in a T-shirt? I don’t think so! The more expensive automotive suits are designed with the primary purpose of being fire-resistant, not abrasion resistant. Remember these guys are strapped into caged vehicles and hopefully in the event of a major incident, won’t be sliding across the track surface. So stick with a driving suit intended for karting. Besides, it’s good business to support those who support our sport.
The other point about driving suits is just that, driving SUITS. I don’t believe in driving jackets. If you come out of that kart your going to want those parts of your body from the waist down protected just as much as those parts above the waist, even more so to some! Besides, if you’re wearing a jacket and a pair of pants, what do you think happens at the waist when you start sliding across the track? They tend to leave a gap, exposing bare skin. Bare skin has very little abrasion resistance! So spend that little extra and get a full suit.
While we are on the topic of bare skin, there is one other thing I should mention. There shouldn’t be any bare skin, period! This means wear a pair of shoes (preferably high top) with a pair of socks. No low tennis shoes with bare ankles sticking out. Don’t forget your hands either. No cotton work gloves. Either get a pair of ’karting’ gloves or better yet, go back to our friends, the motorcycle racers, and get a pair of motocross gloves. These generally have more protective padding over the bony points of your hands, offering more protection than a pair of regular ’driving’ gloves.
So there you have it. Got your helmet, neck collar, driving suit, high tops, and motocross gloves. Are you all set to go racing? Well, maybe. There is one last area of driver safety apparel that is at this time a personal preference. Let’s just generically call them chest protectors. Ideally, though, they should protect more than your chest! Few do however.
Fortunately, most kart racing incidents are relatively minor affairs. Karts are very stable vehicles. However, there is one aspect of kart design that makes for potentially dangerous incidents...OPEN WHEELS! While karts can flip over due to other reasons, the number one, single most reason for karts to flip is the fact that they have open wheels. Now if you are so new to the racing world that you don’t know what happens when kart A runs into the back of kart B, missing the rear bumper and instead running into his tire, let me tell you in one word. Airborne! Does it happen every time? No, but the first time you find yourself four feet in the air, with absolutely no traction or steering, you will wish it never happened. Even if the odds are 1000:1, if you’re that one, than its one too many!
Now that you’re up there four foot in the air, all you have to worry about is how you’re going to land. If you’re lucky, you will land perfectly upright, discovering that karts truly do not have any suspension. Also if your luck holds, you may find yourself part of a Texas kart sandwich, two karts (with drivers) stacked one on top of the other with nothing in between! Once at a district race during a practice session I had backed off going into the first turn after having received the checkered flag ending the session. An FNG (flaming new guy), apparently wanted to get one more practice lap in and failed to realize that I had backed off, hitting me from behind. The next thing I know there’s a Digitron that looks a foot wide stuck in my face shield and a heavy vibrating weight across the back of my shoulders. One arm is pinned somewhere behind me and I can’t move. Of course the other guy is still sitting straight upright in his seat, blipping the @*$% throttle trying to find some traction and not kill his engine! It took four guys to lift him off me. Of course he walked away unscratched. Me, I knew then that I never wanted to be reincarnated as a hay bale!
Not everyone who gets airborne is going to be that lucky. In fact most are not. Generally they are going to land rubber side up. Now look at someone sitting in a sprint kart. What stands out head and shoulders above anything else on the kart? Head and shoulders, ha! So if you turn that sprint kart over, it’s going to be sitting on someone’s head and shoulders. Now the ol’ conventional wisdom has it that it you’ll be thrown from the kart, presumably before the first terra firma impact. This may have been true back in the ’60s, when seats were flat-backed, flat-bottom affairs essentially composed of integral frame members. However nowadays, I’d tend to disagree. Just watch some drivers trying to get out of their karts when they pull into the pits. Some of them darn near need a crowbar to get out of their seat!
So where do chest protectors come into this picture? Well, sometimes the driver does get partially out of the kart prior to landing. Other times when a kart flips, it does not go all the way over. Of course, there is also that second or third or fourth bounce for that poor soul who did get all the way over. These are incidents where the chest protectors help. They diffuse the forces of blunt impact, lessen the chance of penetrating injuries, and provide additional ’plys’ of road contacting material for the sliders out there. Additionally, even if you don’t flip, they provide protection and comfort to your rib cage when you’re slamming it into the hard sides of the seat at 1.5 Gs or more.
While karters have literally dozens of choices for helmets, they have few choices for chest protectors designed specifically for kart racing. The ones there are, are generally designed to be worn like a vest. Composed of soft, dense cushioning material, they may or may not be covered with a hard, generally plastic outer covering. They do provide good protection for chest wall injuries like I described above and they do work! I once pulled a broken-off sparkplug out off the side of a racers Saf-Jak. He may have had a good bruise underneath that area, but he did not have a punctured lung.
The problem with chest protectors and rib belts is that they don’t provide much, if any protection to the common areas of initial impact. Go back to that upside down sprint kart now, knowing that that driver is not likely going to get thrown clear before that first bounce. What’s going to be the initial points of impact? The head and typically one shoulder. While I have seen a couple of chest wall injuries, I’ve seen a dozen shoulder girdle injuries. Mostly fractured clavicles (collarbones) and a handful of fractured scapulas (shoulder blades). The only other activity I have seen which resulted in frequent scapular fractures was ATV riding, specifically the old three wheelers. How many new three wheel ATVs are being sold now? None. The government intervened in the name of safety.
Since its not likely we are going to see mandatory cages and safety harnesses in the near future (god forbid!) and the typical safety vest offers little shoulder girdle protection, what’s a safety conscious karter to do? As so often before, look to our fellow racers on two wheels! Bikers aren’t karters, but they do know about bouncing around with and without the benefit of a vehicle underneath you.
I have seen a number of karters wearing motocross chest protectors. These do provide some protection to both the chest wall and shoulders/upper arms. However, motocross chest protectors were not designed with the primary intent of protecting the wearer from injuries caused when the rapidly moving rider impacts the stationary earth. They are primarily designed to protect the moving rider from much more rapidly moving earth. If you have ever come out of a tight corner right on the tail of an open class motocrosser, you know what I mean. A big ol’ knobby tire being spun by 50-60+ hp can throw chunks of earth, rocks and occasional moles with enough velocity and force to make you temporarily forget what it is you are doing and even why you are doing it!
Now this maybe just the ticket for you dirt oval kartracers, most of the time. The problem with the motocross chest protectors is that they are basically a hard shell with very minimal padding underneath them to help further cushion and disperse the forces caused by impacting stationary objects. So what’s left? Well, back to the bike racers again, only this time the pavement variety. These guys do hit the ground and slide just like we do.
Now I know this is going to sound like an advertisement, but it is the best thing I have come across and it is they only one of its kind that I have been able to find. What I am talking about is a mesh ’jacket’ made by the Dainese Co. of Italy that is designed to be worn under a racing suit. It has the soft, dense padding covered by hard plastic like the karting safety vests. However, in addition to covering the front of the chest, it also has segments covering the elbows/forearms, shoulders/upper arms, and the spine. Is it perfect? Not quite, in my humble opinion. It could use some additional protection over the lateral chest wall and also cover the scapular area a little better, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far. It’s not cheap, at around $200 +/-, but Emergency Room visits aren’t cheap either!
I really don’t know whether or not we should all be wearing some type of ’chest protector’. I make my son wear one, but I never did when I was racing. I am reminded of a story about one of our local stock car tracks. Back in the late ’50s, early ’60s a couple of drivers started showing up wearing fire-proof suits. Most of the other drivers thought they were, shall we say, wimps. Real men didn’t wear fire suits. The next year a driver crashed hard into the forth turn wall and ruptured the fuel tank. In the ensuing explosion and fire, the driver burned to death. Shortly thereafter, everyone started to wear fire-proof suits and use fuel cells. Enough said?
So there you have it, Karting Safety 101! Is this all there is to karting safety? No, not by a long shot! There is still kart safety itself. There is also track safety and last but not least, racing safety, or how that driver (the other guy, of course!) drives. At least now you know some of the things you can, and should do, to protect yourself or your loved one. Remember, the number one rule of kart racing safety, always keep the rubber side down and the helmet side up!
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