My wife gave me a shifter kart course at Bondurant for Christmas. I finally got around to scheduling the course for last Friday.
I've taken a couple of courses at Bondurant and always thought the instruction was excellent. I was assuming we'd get the standard instruction on weight transfer, threshold braking, apexing, etc. Nope! After a 5 minute intro to the kart's controls, we did a couple of laps in a full size van piloted by an instructor and then we were off! We did one lead/follow session with the instructor before we were completely on our own.
Having had driving course and done autocross + track events for years I really didn't mind getting right behind the wheel, but I found it a little strange that there was frighteningly little prep before turning us loose on the track in these beasts. The stats Bondurant quotes for the karts is 0-100 in 6 seconds and 100-0 in 3 seconds.
It was really a lot of fun. According to the instructors we were averaging mid 80mph speeds on the straight. There were seven of us in the class. They split us up into two groups. Unfortunately I was in the group of three. The other four guys were together and would have been more fun to drive with than the guys in my group - I was lapping them 1-2 times per session.
It's a very physically demanding experience. Three days later and I'm still sore in places - mostly my wrists and upper back. Driving a shifter kart really needs to have a place on every car guy's bucket list.
Me!
Here's a short video I found on Youtube of the course set up we were using. This guy obviously knows what he's doing (based on the 360s he's pulling just for fun).