Most rental karters stop improving for one of two reasons. Either they’re learning by copying other drivers, or they’re turning up and doing laps with no plan. Both work early on, and both stop working once you’re within a second or so of the pace. The fix is to build your technique one skill at a time, in a deliberate order.

Every time I go to a rental kart track, subscribers tell me why they’re struggling to improve. Two of the most common are:

• “My friend has a driving style that works for them, but not for me no matter how much I try. Why?”
• “I used to improve every time I went karting, but now I’ve hit a ceiling. The more I try, the more mistakes I make. Why?”

I’ve had hundreds of messages like these, so if either one sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

The advice problem: copying other drivers

When we start out, we go to the track, do a million laps, overhear another driver explaining how they take a corner, try it, and repeat. That’s pure trial and error, built on anecdotal evidence from our competitors.

Copying is the easiest way to get near the pace window. But what if the driver you’re copying just copied someone else? You end up baking in inefficiencies without realizing it. Instead, build your own “driver toolbox” of techniques, and learn how and when to apply each one.

The plateau problem: laps without a plan

Going from 5 seconds off the pace to 2 seconds off might take you two or three sessions. Going from 1 second off to a tenth off is a completely different ball game. For some drivers it takes months or years, and some never get there.

The drivers who find ungodly pace work on techniques in incremental stages, getting 0.1% better every time they drive. My advice is to pick one technique, like visual anchoring, and spend your next four or five sessions focusing only on that. Forget about brake points, throttle traces and racing lines. Just work on vision until it becomes SUBCONSCIOUS. Then, and only then, move on to the next technique.

Learn techniques in the right order

There are no shortcuts to finding speed. I used to think I could out-theorize my competitors by turning racing into an equation: input plus input equals output. But racing has so many variables, many of which we can’t define or even identify in the moment, that nobody ever drives a perfect lap. We simply have to be closer to perfect, more often, than anyone else on the grid that day.

The way to get there is to build your technique like a house. You start with the foundation, then the floor, the walls, and finally the roof. The foundation is arguably the most important layer, but without the roof it isn’t really a house. In racing terms, visual anchoring is the foundation, being latest on the brakes is the walls, and switchback overtakes are the roof.

That order is where a lot of untrained drivers go wrong. They want to be the latest on the brakes or the best at switchback overtakes before they’ve mastered visual anchoring. So no matter how experienced you are, consider stripping everything back to the basics and rebuilding from there. You’ll be a more well-rounded, more competitive driver, and you’ll get results in less time with less money burned.