Love shooting (clay pidgeons) my big thing is karting, if I'd been supported more as a child I'd be challenging Vettle!!!! I wish!!!
You and me both! I first started working for a karting center when I was about 11 or 12 in my school holidays then carried on working there for the next 5 years while bunking off school for track meetings
😱pps: and most nights
By 13 their wasn't much I couldn't do in a kart as I would spend hours driving and fixing them every day. Of course being teenager and fairly handy i was always showing off in front of customers, I could 180 it at speed in to a parking space between 2 karts with the space being no more then 150mm bigger than the kart itself and everytime too. There was another lad Danny who was bloody good too, we could race round the track taking the same line with bumpers touching and drifting round corners side by side without ever taking the other one out as we knew each other so well. We thought we were cool, i'm sure the customers thought we were cocky little gits!
It's a very fond period of my life and like you I wish my parents had understood what I had, but alas they didn't invest the time and money in to me
Where did you use to race mate? This is a post I made in another part of the forum about a year or so ago. My story is now the second one down in the link.
When I was at secondary school I would bunk off to go and work at a karting track in Brighton, I was there from its set up until it closed down about 6 years later. I had some great times there and have quite a few funny stories as most of the lads who worked there were all under 20 and knew no fear.
Anyway there is a karting track that was next to the BBC centre in London, it set up about the same time as us but had a massive budget and celeb backing so it's always stuck in my mind, I was checking them out again as I was thinking of doing a meeting there on my Birthday. As I was looking around I saw a story posted by the CEO about him and his mates driving round Embankment in the karts and nearly getting nicked in the process, it brought back some memorys so I emailed the guy and told him about a similar story that happened to us.
Well he only went and put it on the website:lol: although he edited out the bit about our boss, he wasn't out at all but was shagging the secretary in the office at the time (both were married)
http://www.daytona.co.uk/team/ceo.html
and this was his story
23.4.09
Haven’t posted in a while so I thought I would share some memories over the next few weeks that have made me chuckle over the years:
Daytona was conceived in a small studio just off the Lower Richmond Road in Putney and our first fleet of karts was stored there for a while. One night in November 1990 my cousin Rob and I were sitting in the studio, around 11p.m. eyeing the karts and we decided it might be an idea to take a couple for a spin. So we carried a couple outside, started them up and took off down the road. These karts had been delivered with a 69 tooth rear sprocket, which meant that they were geared for about 60mph!
So we decided to do a circuit, down Lower Richmond Road, left into Thames Place, along the Embankment and left again into Festing Road. I was leading as we sped along the embankment, under cover of Darkness and we as arrived at the left into Festing Road I saw a jam sandwich with two bobbies sitting there, they used to hang out down there to stop all the George Michaels! I booted it and slung the kart into the left hander that is Festing, bounced off a few parked cars and got my kart manhandled through the door of the studio and then turned the lights off.
Rob saw the bill and dived in behind behind one of those big trailers that they use to lug the rowing eights about. Apparently he pulled a big green tarpaulin over him and the kart and sat there with the exhaust suffocating him. After a minute or so a car pulled up next to the trailer and Rob heard a window going down, then a hand appeared and lifted the tarpaulin and Rob was face to face with the fuzz. Apparently the copper said “be careful”, dropped the tarpaulin and they drove off!
