Kart Wire

 A Race Engineer in Every Racer's Pocket :  Meet the Two Young Founders Building It Every once in a while, someone shows up in our inbox doing exactly what we believe in, and we can't wait to tell you about it. This week, that was RaceSense. Karting has a problem we've talked about a lot at Kart Wire: the things that make you faster tend to cost money. A coach, a data setup, a crew. If you're a family with a used kart and a tight budget, you're usually doing it alone. Harry Bedford and Samuel Williams looked at that and decided to build something about it. We think it's one of the best examples of what this publication is for: making racing easier for the everyday driver.  Two Racers, One Idea Harry and Samuel describe themselves as young engineering enthusiasts with a shared passion for motorsport and technology. Their idea is simple, and it comes straight from the paddock. "Grassroots racers should have access to useful race information withou...

Don't Wait Until You're Grown: A 17-Year-Old Is Building a Racing Team I tell my kids the same thing all the time: don't wait until you're grown to chase your dreams. Do the big thing. Do the hard thing. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed, and I believe God knew each of them would be here for such a time as this. Then a 17-year-old from the Northeast sent me an Instagram message, and I got to watch someone live it. Her name is Madison Koenig. Everyone in racing calls her MK. It Started With a Race She Didn't Plan to Watch One random morning in 2024, MK and a friend turned on a Formula 1 race. Carlos Sainz won it. "Ever since then," she told us, "motorsport has been my entire life." That September she walked into an indoor kart track for the first time. When she pulled back into the pits, she thought, "This is what I want to do." Her first season didn't go the way a movie would. Her best finish was P6. She calls it a rough sta...

Four Tracks, 100 Drivers a Weekend, and a Kid Who Wouldn't Quit:   Karting in Ireland A racer from Ireland sent Kart Wire a message. We read it twice, and then we had questions. What does karting look like over there? Who races, who pays, and what does a family do on a rainy Sunday in County Meath? So we asked. Josh Higgins, a Tillotson T4 Mini driver, answered, with his dad, Matt, helping out and giving us his blessing to share it. We came away with something better than a spec sheet. We got a picture of a sport that looks a lot like ours, with a few things it does differently and a few problems it shares. The Rain Didn't Care That He Was Seven Josh's first time on an outdoor track was in heavy rain. He spun out a couple of times. "I never gave up," he told us. He got there the way a lot of us do. His dad raced karts in the UK when he was young. When Josh was seven, they took a couple of his friends to the Zone, a local indoor track, and h...

Nobody Asks About the Close Calls: Drew Bottoms' Racing Journey Most racing profiles walk through a timeline — first kart, first win, first championship. We reached out to Drew Bottoms wanting something different from that formula, and once his answers started coming in, it was clear we'd asked the right driver. The stats aren't what makes his story worth telling. The turning points are. The Spark Drew's path into karting started secondhand. His dad's friend brought him up to Atlanta Motorsports Park to drive, and his dad came home talking about what he'd seen — how cool the karts looked, what the place was like. That secondhand excitement was enough to get Drew into a kart himself. But watching your dad get excited about something and actually deciding to race it are two different things. For Drew, the real moment came after some rental karting, the first time he got into an LO206. "I loved it so much it kickstarted my career and passion for th...

FIA's New Anti-Launch Devices Are Here. We Want to Know What You Think . If you've watched international karting this year and noticed karts wearing a chunkier, more enclosed rear bumper than you remember, you're not imagining things. That's the FIA's new Anti-Launch Device, and depending on who you ask, it's either a genuine safety breakthrough or an expensive solution looking for a problem. What It Actually Is The Anti-Launch Device is a rear fairing with integrated wheel covers, built after more than a year and a half of research by the FIA Safety Department. The goal is simple: when two karts make wheel-to-wheel contact, one of them can ride up over the other's tire and go airborne, sometimes flipping. The FIA considers that one of the most dangerous scenarios a driver can face on track, and the new bumper is designed specifically to stop it from happening. It's not a concept anymore. As of April 1, 2026, it's mandatory in internation...