Being good at driving karts is not just down to track time and technique. You have to be fit too. There are serious g-forces, arm-killing steering from tyres that stick like glue, body bumps and bashes from non-existent suspension, and the threat of a crash if you don’t keep focussed from the beginning to the end of a race. Hours and hours of seat time is not going to help you with the strength you need for karting.
According to Haas F1 Team driver Romain Grosjean, go-karting can be more physically demanding than driving an F1 car.
That’s why Kate, being inspired by Dean Fouache’s talk on Buckmore Park’s Driver Development Programme, has joined the gym. Dean is the founder of Karting Athlete Development, an organisation that provides an elite training and development programme for young karting athletes.
And, if Kate joins a gym, that means I have to join too! (Which is no bad thing.) But my job is to keep her on track with her programme. If Kate had her way, she’d just do the exercises she likes and skip the stuff that’s painful and tiring, and she’d rather pump her biceps than hang on a pole for 60 seconds or do some sit-ups.
We’ve just come back from a session at Crystal Palace. We’re both exhausted. The staff are getting to know us (partly due to my ‘wife-carrying race’ t-shirt, but that’s another story), Kate set a PB for her ‘plank’ exercise, and her biceps are definitely getting bigger. So Kate's happy. And she's off to do a day’s driving on Friday in X30s at PFI with OMS Racing as part of the Formula Women initiative. And Kate will definitely have to be fit for that.
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