Harewood Gravity Games 2024

Harewood Gravity Games 2024

This was our first time attending Harewood Soapbox and had heard many great expectations about the weekend so we were really looking forward to it. This was also the first time where it was a two day event with practice runs on the Saturday and race runs on the Sunday. This worked well for us as we never had ran this track before and we only had two previous races in the new kart.

The only thing we changed between Welton and Harewood was getting completely free running wheels due to the brake callipers not retracting enough when off the brake pedal. We tried many different versions of brake callipers to try and prevent this issue, however one problem we had was the limited space we had between the rim and the brake pad. Another problem was the thickness of the pad. Eventually we found a set of brake callipers that retracted enough and gave us enough braking power.

On the Saturday, we managed to get 9 runs in which gave me good confidence going forward to Sunday to be able to keep getting quicker and quicker. I was very cautious on my first few runs as it was a very steep hill and was a daunting sight to start with. I started off the Saturday with times in the region of 1 minute 30’s, and progressed down into the mid 1 minute 20’s.

After some discussions and some data analysis, on the Sunday we decided to run the max weight we could possible of the kart, along with increasing tyre pressures by 15 PSI throughout the day. We started the day on 30 PSI and was achieving roughly 1 minute 22’s. This was a very good and confident start to the day. I was pretty consistent throughout the day maintaining rough 1 minute 22’s. As we increased the tyre pressures slightly going from 30 to 35 PSI first we started to gradually shave tenths off my time and increased the speed. With this in my mind we decided to go full out on my final run of the day. We removed the GoPro and the Racebox as well as taping a slight gap behind my head where the Racebox sat to further improve our aerodynamics. Finally, we increased the tyre pressures even more up to 45 PSI. This was then my fastest run of the weekend, clocking in at a 1:21.798 and a max speed of 40mph.

This was still 5.4 seconds off the leader, however it put me P9/28 karts in a full adult field, where the majority of them had raced this circuit many times.

I was very happy with this result as I was up near some of the experienced soapboxes and drivers.

Due to the multiple GoPro recordings and long recordings, I have made a Google Drive folder with all Harewood Gravity Games onboard videos in. If you would like to view these, just drop me an email through the contact form found on all the pages of the website.

📸Alexander Ian and Scipspics