KEES VAN DE GRINT:

THE TECHNICAL REVOLUTIONS OF KARTING (THAT NEVER HAPPENED)

In old-time karting, "extravagant" chassis were the order of the day. They surprised and were even fast, so much so that they could unleash real technical revolutions, but in the end something always happened that stopped them. Precisely for this reason, karting can also participate in the “who knows if” choir. Who knows how they would have performed and what those chassis would have led to… If only they could have raced. Faced with the question "What is the greatest technical revolution in karting that has never come true?", even a motorsport opinion leader like Kees van de Grint, who knows the history of karting, and has experienced practically all of it, has a few moments of hesitation. Moments that return the measure of the quantity of potentially revolutionary ideas that were never fully realised which have followed one another in the history of this sport since 1956, the year it started in the United States. In any case, Kees just needs to reflect for a moment to get the first "illumination" of this story: the Robardie chassis (produced by Bengt Peterson in the 1960s, already discussed in the journey we conducted, again thanks to Kees van de Grint, in the “Four technical eras of go-karting”) called X2, which debuted in 1971.