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If we were to list the scariest forms of motorsport, this would be very near the top of my list.
I’ve driven a fair few very scary cars. Formula 1 cars, Classic Sports Cars with very simple suspension and some very fun hill climb cars.
But this Drag Racing series takes the cake, they are called Drag Karts and can beat pretty much anything that would come off a production line. They’ve got 450 horsepower and only weigh 250 kg - yep that’s a power to weight ratio of 1800 horsepower per tonne.
But perhaps the scarier thing is that it’s all attached to a custom-made home-built chassis.
So let me take you through the insane engineering behind Drag Karts, and explain just how fast these things are.
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Now, I feel we need some context here. For me, a scary car is something that is hard to predict - or where things can go wrong faster than you can save them.
And for me, the scariest car I’ve driven is the 1992 Benetton Formula 1 car - this thing had 680 horsepower and only weighed 505 kg. This comes out at 1340 horsepower per tonne, which is pretty much identical to today’s F1 cars.
But what made it scary was how (relatively) simple the suspension was. It had fairly conventional pushrod suspension, which compared to today’s systems, was very unrefined.
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This is Scott Cooper, and his CBR 1000 Drag Kart - and we spoke to him to see what on earth he was thinking when he built this from scratch - then races it at speed of up to 185 miles per hour.
It started life as a standard kart chassis, most likely intended for speeds of about 40 or 50 miles per hour. It’s been chopped in two, meaning only the front section remains - behind that, the kart is fully bespoke.
And it’s custom-made in order to fit a CBR 1000 engine to it - and this comes from the top-of-the-line sports bike from Honda.
It’s an inline four-cylinder that revs to well over 12’000 rpm, which is more than enough to make that bike a handful. But Scott has added a massive twin-screw supercharger.
But that’s not all, he also runs it on pure methanol. Which as a fuel, actually contains less energy per gallon - however, you can burn much more of it per stroke as it needs less air and ultimately produces as much as 60% more power than if it were run on petrol.
And all of that means the engine produces around 450 horsepower.
[Have you ever taken it to full throttle? No - you barely get past half]
These high-powered bike engines are perfect for these karts, they produce a lot of power for something so small and light. As well as coming with a pneumatic-sequential gearbox that can shift in 20 milliseconds - pretty similar to any high-end rally car.
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