Alpha Male Manley Lectures: The Day I Got To Know Motorsports

"Oh frickety frack!" as Dr. Sheldon Cooper sometimes laments on Big Bang Theory. I know how that feels, and when I first got into go-karting, I often found myself saying aloud, "Frickety frack...I've crashed again!"

Hitting a side barrier's not that big of a deal, however. Here's what is: track timing. When it comes to elapsed time, I consider my own to be horrible. But then, look what me and a lot of my disabled, racing enthusiast buddies are up against.

But if you follow me online, then you already know that I've been to Balboa Park in Lake Balboa, California. It was there that I felt that itch for retrofitting things, that which Mr. Shelby himself must've once felt. Those visits happened recently, but here's what I found out during those tests: able-bodied and challenged kart racers were in need of power-assisted steering.

For me, that didn't translate to making a posh car build out of a go-kart; it meant building at least one or two Electro Karts for the track, that were built with the same, power-assisted consoles that many electric wheelchairs were already using.

As usual, it's easy in theory, but not practice. But since we can't build anything right away, here are the statistics. Driving one of OTL's Elektro Karts at MB2 Raceway in Sylmar, California, I was able to run a best E/T of about 28.1 seconds. This is with the knowledge that MB2 takes-up a quarter-mile of space, and with the kart running optimally.

On my C500 power chair, I was able to pull-off a track time of around 1:32:87, and this was with a top speed of 5.1 miles per hour, so one sees how performance truly is a relative thing.

Does that mean that I'm lacking in performance? Could be, but that wasn't really the point. Here's what it is: speed costs money, a lot of MB2's racers are physically-challenged, but what all of them cannot afford, is to be excluded from motorsports.

In one sentence...take Permobil's "R-Net" console, take the "J-Series" console from EMC...take any of those pieces of adaptive equipment and bolt that on to an Elektro Kart. Whether new or used, adapting an OTL go-kart, in the way of assistive consoles, will open a new market for disabled motor enthusiasts.