BASIC TYRE PRESSURE MANAGEMENT GUIDE FOR KARTS

The inflation pressure of tyres is a fundamental element in motorsport, a fact that plays a key role in achieving the best performance with your kart. Just imagine: could you win a 100-metre race with wrong size shoes? Years of training, technique and sacrifices thrown to the wind for having mistaken the size of the shoes. Something similar happens in karting, even if the issue, in the case of kart tyres compared to an athlete's shoes, is more complicated because tyres are not a static element, but a variable one. Their inflation pressure is not an absolute and stable value but is influenced by other parameters such as the temperature of the air or the track, the set-up, the compound. Therefore, understanding what the right tyre inflation pressure is depending on the driving conditions you are facing will play a key role during your weekend on the track and in races. We asked Pascal Cardinale, owner of Prisma Electronics, (a company specialised in the manufacture of pressure gauges, pyrometers and digital chronometers for the world of motorsport), to guide us, with advice and clarifications, on the subject of kart tyre pressures.

1 How important is kart tyre pressure?

To understand how important tyre pressure is, just consider that all the setup interventions that are carried out have a single goal: to obtain an optimal use of tyres, the only point of contact between the kart and the track. You can improve your driving as much as you want and you can refine the carburetion in the best possible way, but in the end all these interventions will work if the tyres work in the correct way. And to make tyres work optimally, pressure plays a fundamental role for two reasons: on the one hand, pressure, together with temperature, is one of the few useful indicators for analysing the operation of tyres; on the other hand, cold pressure is the only mechanism, together with the set-up, on which to intervene to solve all the problems related to performance deficits related to the drivability of a kart.