Karte Blanche
Karts and drinks and pies would come into sight amid a blue Castrol haze...
Most formula-one drivers start their stellar careers driving go-karts – it has the effect of making them feel safer, surrounded in their ultimate drive by all manner of carbon fibre monocoques and halos. By comparison kart-drivers are wonderfully thrillingly exposed and, aside from their helmet, there is hardly more to protect them than a pair of overalls.
Mount Crosby had a first-class go-kart track in the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps it lasted until 1980. About once a month, kart racers and curious locals would be called to prayer by the wailing of small motors that could be heard across the whole of the district.
The track was on Burrows’ land behind the row of houses across the road from the State School. You entered past the “big tree with much to tell”, about opposite the end of College Road, and if you arrived on a bicycle and could manage a hard-up look there was a good chance you’d get in for free.
Because we lived near the Sportsground, my usual route was a lot more interesting:
I went down to the river on bumpy road, and across the plums and gravel, then a sip from the little rivulet that found its way around the old weir (with its bottle-brushes cheerfully weeping), before a long jump across the weir’s gap and onwards up the hill of famous fossils until arriving at the little plateau that tops the conglomerate stone of the Lower Blackwall (we also called it Black Rock).
From there, I just navigated towards those crying engines and, before long, karts and drinks and pies would come into sight amid a blue Castrol haze.
The track was the shape of a prep-schooler’s letter B, the downward stroke of it being the straight, which was genuinely downhill and ended in a tight left turn designed to teach you a lesson in physics. If you wanted to see something spectacular, that was the place to be.
The kart club employed all of the health and safety regulations commensurate with such activities at the time, meaning it was truly a courageous act to race there. I can’t remember too many of the drivers’ names, and I don’t know if any of them went on to more famous things.
One that does come to mind is Willie Schmidt of Tivoli (Box Stock Light). I went on to watch a lot of motor cars, but the best days of racing were those spent watching Willie and the other Mount Crosby karters.