Grid distance

[Britt Robinson]

At my local track our grid is painted so that the distance between, say P1 and P3, ends up being about 3' tail to nose. Because of a few botched starts, some by me , the club decided to visually grid the karts farther apart instead of using the painted lines for increased safety. My question is; Do any of the sanctioning bodies have some kind of standard distance for the grid?
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I am a precisional instrument of speed and aeromatics. - Mater

[Randy Mckee]

I don't think there's a standard and it varies quite a lot from race to race. A few factors that might influence the lineup is number of competitors, track design, and of course what you mentioned, the perspective of the officials.

Checkout how tight this line-up was at the PKC 2010 north-south shootout.

http://vimeo.com/15064187

That is the tightest lineup I've ever seen, and surely a recipe for disaster. They had a huge number of entries and the track design leading to the start/finish is curved, so a tough situation. Luckily, most of those drivers continued.

My take: Stagger the grid and probably 3 to 4 kart lengths between rows. That way if both karts in a row stall, there's an easier route around them. Here's an example at the same track, same series but fewer entries:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1fP4Vs8erc
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Randy
#123 TonyKart - S4 Stock Honda

[Britt Robinson]

[Roger Miller]

As we traveled to different tracks and needed our own grid markings, I built a simple thing out of sprinkler pipe (the white stuff, I always forget if that is PVC or ABS, or whatever) and we used a staggered grid, so pole was ahead of P2 and P2 was ahead of P3, similar to F1.

Then, the distance between nose of P1 and nose of P3 was setup to be 10 foot plus a couple of inches. In other words, used a 10' length of pipe, cut it in the middle for T connection, and then put 2' pieces on 90 degree connectors at each end and on the T in the middle.

P1 |________________________| P3
.........................| P2

(Sorry about the periods in there, the forum suppresses leading spaces so it wasn't showing up correctly with out them)
Sorta like that - 10' long and 4' across. Inside front tire on the mark, so P1 puts left front on the mark, P2 puts right front on the mark, and P3 puts left front on the mark.

Then it was a simple, drag it down the track, line up P1 end on P3 mark, mark P4 and P5, repeat.......

And the whole thing broke down to the pieces and was easily stored in the trailer.

We stopped doing standing starts and went to all rolling starts on the track (still do wall starts, but that is a whole different thing) but if we would have continued to do this, I would have added holes in the fittings to be able to put pins in to lock in the side pieces and the middle connection.
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Roger Miller
NCK President
www.nckroadracing.com

[Jim McMahon]

I believe there are stipulations in the FIA\CIK rulebook but I'll be darned if I can find them!
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[chuck hurlbert]

[Tim Salvino]

[Mike Beeny]

Its also a good idea to set the grid markers closer to the center of the track as opposed to being further out toward the edge of the track. I would guess having a maximum of 3ft or so on a 29ft track is good.

The reason for this is it allows you an opportunity to move to the outside edge of the track in the event someone is low off the line. When the grid markers are too far apart everyone has a tendency to move towards the center of the track and ultimately have no place to go.
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Mike Beeny
www.msquaredkarting.com
www.used-karts.com

[Britt Robinson]