On Friday night we headed out to a birthday party at a place called Kart 2 Kart, an indoor go-kart racing place. It was a lot of fun and I discovered that, when it comes to racing, I make a pretty good photographer. It’s not that I don’t enjoy whipping around a hairpin turn in an overpowered riding lawnmower, I’m just not very good at it.
One of the first things that you need to do, before you even get the safety lecture, is sign the waiver. You are warned right off that go-kart racing is an inherently dangerous activity and that the risks include BODILY INJURY, DISMEMBERMENT, TOTAL AND PERMANENT DISABILITY or DEATH. I think I should have a notice like that for readers of this website. It encourages a sense of foreboding even when none is needed.
Nobody actually got injured, but you could see that the potential was there. Watching the first couple of runs gave me some ideas of what to look out for while I was racing, and where to take pictures when I wasn’t. The turns tend to be where the interesting things happen… People spin out occasionally, but more often than not, if you’re looking to pass someone you need to do it on a turn. The straightaways simply go by too fast.
There were enough of us at the party that we were split into three groups of racers: fast, medium and slow. I signed on for the ‘slow’ group. A lot of the people in the fast and medium groups were car racing buddies of the birthday boy. Did I mention that he was a part-time race car driver? Yeah. So no worries about competitive overload there…
Everybody was supposed to race three times. The first race was for familiarization, a chance for people to get used to the karts. The proprieter gave the not terribly useful advice that the handling was “not too different from your racecar.”
Great. Given that the only racecar I own is powered by two AA batteries that’s a real help. Thanks.
Anyway, in the first race I placed sixth out of ten. The second race bumped me down to seventh, and I bowed out of the third race entirely. Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun, even with my humbling race results. By that point I was just more interested in trying to get good photographs.
My biggest challenge was that I decided to not use a flash for any of the pictures in the racetrack area. I figured that the racers had enough to worry about without having a bright light popped in their face every time they came out of the sharp turn near the pits. I think it worked out quite well since the longer exposure times made for some interesting blur effects.