Howdy,
On Sat, 13 May 2000, Jay Mitchell wrote:
> Now, my objection to karts comes down to what is very likely to happen
> when a kart has such an unfortunate incident. The relative lack of
> success of F125 has helped to reduce the statistical likelihood of this
> happening, but, sooner or later, it will. In that scenario, a kart is
> nowhere near as safe as a car. Why? Because there is no protection for
> the driver provided by the vehicle itself. This issue is not
> controversial. It's precisely why seatbelts are not allowed in kart
> racing. It does not take intimate familiarity with karts to recognize
> the obvious: that a vehicle with no protective structure will not do as
> good a job at preventing occupant injuries in a collision as one that
> has such a structure.
I don't disagree with this, but its not the full story.
For me to fully decide and have an opinion, I'd also have to decide what
the likelihood was of one of the accidents described above. As folks have
pointed out, karts, due to having less mass, will typically stop _faster_
than cars. Ergo if its unlikely for a regular car to hit something on an
autox course (and it damn well better be highly unlikely, as per autox's
charter), then at the very least its just as unlikely or perhaps more so
for a kart to hit something.
The other part of my decision has to do with personal risk. I
fundamentially hold the belief that if someone else decides to take a risk
that doesn't affect me, that's their business. An out of control kart
presents no more danger than an out of control car to people who aren't in
the kart/car. You can make the argument that driver of a kart is more
likely to get injured in the event of hitting something solid than a
person in a car and further that that injury will increase the
chances that Solo has insurance or site problems. Given the lack of data
I suspect we both have on that, there's no right answer to that one.
However I do propose that the extremely low liklihood of solid contact and
the fact that solo, which pretty darn safe, has had incidents in the past
totally unrelated to karts means that the increased risk of problems _due
solely to karts_ is negligible.
Personally, it sounds to me like you have convincing reasons why _you_
shouldn't/wouldn't drive a kart. So far I haven't heard anything
convincing as to why karts should be outlawed from solo2.
Mark
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