BY P. MANCINI
DR’s extremely modern test room with state-of-the-art dynamometer brake. The room, air-conditioned and equipped with all the devices to ensure a perfect constancy of testing, is the best any tuner could wish for.
I started attending kart tracks when I was still in baby shorts (what they were called in my time, the same shorts with tribal tattooing so fashionable today…). It’s all changed a bit: karts, tires, engines, drivers … but one thing has remained constant over time: boasting about non-existent horsepower. You declare 40? Okay, so I’ve got 41, because I beat you by 4/10ths per lap. Or: before tuning, your engine was awful, had 38 Hp and now it has 45. Yes, maybe I go around 3 tenths slower, but it matters little: I gained 7 HPs. As a journalist I was away from the world of karting for about 7 years. From gains declared then to today, about 1 HP a year, a KZ should have reached 54 CV. But at Sarno, on the occasion of the last European Championship for the gearbox category, the maximum speeds have remained the same as those of 7 years ago. Which suggests that there hasn’t been all this power gain. So, to understand how a test bench functions, how a test should be performed and how to understand when they’re kidding us or when they’re telling us the truth, we need to keep in mind a few essential factors.
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n. 218 August 2019
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