How much horsepower do you need to have fun in a car? More is usually better, but sometimes less is okay too. Sometimes even none is enough – if you have gravity on your side. When you're running off-road through mud, rocks, up hills, crashing off of whoops and flying over jumps, you certainly can't rely on the attraction of physical bodies to get you around the course. You need power. Cornell's Baja SAE buggy admittedly doesn't have much, driven by a lowly 10-hp Briggs & Stratton that wouldn't look out of place on a lawnmower. This most certainly is not a lawnmower.

Cornell's team of students past and present have built an impressive chariot to cradle that engine and a driver. CAD modeled, CNC hewn and carbon fiber-skinned, nearly everything on the kart is a one-off created by the sort of technology that drives Formula One. When an offer came in to come drive the thing, we jumped right in – right in to a mudbath as it turned out. Won't you join us?

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WRAPPING UP

The leaves have long-since changed and most have fallen off. There's a chill in the air and the odd snowflake, too. The summer motorsports season is at an end, and it's time to think about putting everything into stasis for the winter. With a kart, this requires a bit of work: freezing temperatures and race hardware don't tend to get along. But, even if you have a spacious, heated garage there's still some prep-work and general maintenance you should know how to do. In this final installment of An Introduction to Karting we'll walk you through tearing down and cleaning the kart, answer some questions received from readers, and mix in a little more race footage from the final event of the year.

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HAVE ENGINE, WILL PRACTICE

Finally, after weeks of learning, shopping, and preparation, we have a track-ready kart. If you've been following along with our An Introduction to Karting series you're probably just as ready to go as we are. Last time we got our chassis, installed the seat, and finally spooned a little two-stroke Rotax 125 engine on the back. The only thing left to add is a driver, and wouldn't you know it we have one of those.

In this installment we'll hit the track with the kart, get the motor broken in properly, start looking at some tuning parameters, and have a heck of a lot of fun drifting around the track on some ancient tires that appear to have been hewn from slate or something similarly hard. We'll also get some further advice on driving techniques, troubleshoot some brake issues, and learn just how easy it is to make a kart point in the wrong direction at high-speed – captured for you in high definition.

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PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS
If you have the money, there's nothing like a sweet, freshly painted beauty that's been buffed, shined, and carefully assembled by the skilled hands at your local kart shop. It only came out of its box thanks to a check you signed, the first time it hits the track will be with your rump in the seat, and the first time it gets spun into the kitty litter it'll be due to your lack of grip/road/talent. Unfortunately, not everybody has the bank account for that, having to do a little extra work themselves to get onto the track. That's us.

If you've been following along in our An Introduction to Karting series then you learned a bit about the sport, came along with us to driving school, and most recently got a strong a dose of budgetary reality. Now it's time to find a kart. Read on to find out where to look, what to look for, and how to get it ready to race.

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We've been accused of acting as facilitators; as dealers; as dastardly souls encouraging readers to engage in a one-way trip toward an expensive, time-consuming hobby. That's pretty accurate. Yes, we did describe karting as an inexpensive way into a serious motorsport, and that's true, but any racer or would-be should know that few forms of motorsport are truly inexpensive. Karting is no different. You can get going in the sport for cheap, but running costs escalate quickly, leaving the most finely honed budgets full of holes and rusting by the side of the road.

After getting a taste for real karting at the school we attended in Part 2, and after our bruises had faded, we knew we needed more. What we didn't know was whether we could afford it. So we set out creating a budget, then went about buying what we'd need and along the way made a number of... revisions. We're more or less done shopping at this point, meaning you get the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, but of course our priorities may not jive with yours so don't come yelling at us if your numbers come up differently.

First, though, you need to decide what kind of racing we're going to do.

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Welcome to the second installment of our Introduction to Karting series. Hopefully the first piece piqued your interest with tales of tiny machines pulling 3 g in the corners then hitting 60 in under three seconds on their way up to over 140 MPH. (Well over, as it turns out; one commenter indicated he hit an indicated 156 this season.) That kind of performance is unequaled outside of top-level formula motorsport, yet is available to anyone with some disposable income and a passion for going quick.

However, karting isn't for everyone so suitably endowed. The physical demands placed on a kart racer are hard to comprehend until you're in a fast turn, holding your breath because you can't inhale, feeling like your head is going to fly off and land somewhere in the pits. Chances are it won't, but whether or not you can withstand that while maintaining a good racing line and keeping an eye on a swarm of opponents is an important thing to find out before breaking out the charge card. The best way is, of course, to try it, and given the big up-front cost to buy a kart, a rental is the way to go.

To get our first real experience we signed up for an afternoon's racing school. We walked the track, worked with multiple instructors, got a lot of advice, had an impromptu race, and stuck it out for way more seat time than was probably advisable for a newbie. How'd we do? Read on to find out, and see some videos of our on (and, occasionally, off) track antics.

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Michael Schumacher. Ayrton Senna. Jeff Gordon. Alex Zanardi. Danica Patrick. All great drivers and all learned their trade in buzzy little racing karts with no suspension, no downforce, minimal protection, and arguably more grins per dollar than any other motorsport in existence. The underpowered machines at the local putt-putt course give karting a bad reputation; a 2.5 horsepower motor in a 300-pound chassis rolling on ten-year-old tires is a $7.50 distraction for kids. But move up to a machine that can do 0-60 MPH in under four seconds, hit 125 MPH on the straight, pull 3 g on the skidpad, and do so for well under $10,000 -- that's serious.

Karting is the safest, cheapest and, arguably, best avenue into motorsports for those with the desire to compete, yet lacking the financial means to get into a top-tier series. Sadly, it's also a dizzying sea of classes, chassis, engines, tires, tracks, rules, and affiliations, some of which are tightly controlled by global organizing bodies. So finding the right way in and getting the most for your money can be tough. That's where we come in.

Autoblog is going karting, jumping in as rookies and making some rookie mistakes so you won't have to. We'll tell you where to start, how much you'll need to budget, where you can save some bucks, and where you should just take a deep breath and hand over the credit card. This is the first in a series, an introduction to the sport that will give you the basics of where to start looking. In subsequent pieces we'll cover driving lessons, go kart shopping, talk setup, and finally go racing. So, without further ado, let's get rolling.

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