rhyshanscombe posted: " If you can't tell by the title, I love Motorsports. Whether I'm using my simulator setup from home, or driving my kart, I'm at peace when racing. How I started My first experience of being behind the wheel was when I was 11 years old. I don't reme" Rhys Hanscombe
If you can't tell by the title, I love Motorsports. Whether I'm using my simulator setup from home, or driving my kart, I'm at peace when racing.
How I started
My first experience of being behind the wheel was when I was 11 years old. I don't remember much of my first 30 minutes around the TeamSport Gosport track, but there must have been something about it that infected me with the bug of Motorsports.
It was a few years after when my Dad bought us our own Rotax Max Kart. During this time, my primary focus was on playing football.
My Dad and I took our kart to places like Clay Pigeon and Forest Edge on practice days, but I couldn't get the hang of it. With a top speed of about 87mph, it was a lot quicker than anything that I'd controlled before. That is what scared me away from wanting to pursue racing any further at the time. I was too busy trying to play football at the highest level that I could (and too scared to put my foot down).
Growing into motorsports
We eventually sold the kart once I came to the conclusion that I probably wasn't cut out for driving fast. However, when I started learning to drive at 17 years of age, that's when I started to feel a lot more comfortable being in control of something with an engine and four wheels.
It sounds silly, but I still think that playing Forza Horizon 4 helped me pass my driving test quicker. Yeah, I'm not sure how that adds up. I just remember feeling a lot sharper on driving lessons after playing Forza a lot…
With my own car and driving licence also came freedom. I always followed Formula 1 from far enough to know that Lewis Hamilton won almost every race from 2014 to 2020. And as I got older, that interest seemed to grow with the help of the Formula 1 game by Codemasters. I played F1 2010 for the majority of my youth, just because we had no other racing game. This was until I bought F1 2019 as my intrigue for the sport began to grow at a rapid pace.
catching the motorsports bug
Regularly visiting my local indoor karting track, and playing the Formula 1 game eventually led to me buying tickets to the 2020 British Grand Prix. But, COVID had other plans. So instead, we went to the 2021 British Grand Prix.
This was my first experience of live Formula 1, and I fell in love instantly. Even listening to the F2 cars scream down the start/ finish straight was enough to give me goosebumps. I only saw about 30 seconds of F1 car throughout the 2-hour race (because I was stood opposite the pits), and I may have got sunburn on one side of my neck, but I couldn't get enough of it.
Shortly after the excitement of my first F1 race, next on the agenda was buying my own kart (again). This time, I wanted to try out a Prokart. We found a second hand kart on eBay for just £250, so we had our own kart (again) within a month of the Grand Prix.
It was an old hire kart. It had a very heavy chassis with a lot of work needed to be done for it to be functional. £100s and 6 months later, I finally got to drive the kart at Clay Pigeon.
Well, I got to drive it for about an hour until one of my engines decided to give up on me…
Complete freedom
I can best describe racing if you don't know is this. Nothing else in the world matters. There is no future, and there is no future. Your entire energy and focus is on right now, and whatever is 10 metres in front of you.
That's it. That's why I love Motorsports. It is complete freedom. The feeling of taking the corner perfectly is unmatched with anything I've felt. And if you don't hit that corner great, then there's always the next corner.
In a way, I think that Motorsports has helped me become more mature and smarter in every day life because of this. There isn't any use in getting down or disheartened when something doesn't go your way (getting overtaken or missing an apex). The only thing we can do is keep on moving forward and try to make the next thing even better (the next corner).
My aspirations in motorsports
Fast forwarding to the present day. We have sold our old Pro kart, and bought a newer one. During our last practice day, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to drive a quicker kart. I was 4 seconds per lap quicker in that one compared to our one. But that 20 minutes in a quicker kart just fueled my hunger and passion even more to race.
The dream is to race as much as possible. But that requires a lot of money and a lot of time. I'm working hard to get to a point where I can race regularly behind the wheel of anything with four wheels.
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