U18 D-10: Chassis under control

In its desire to reduce costs, the CIK has not only concentrated its efforts on the tyres and engines, which – as you know – will be delivered free of charge to all the drivers within the framework of each of the 3 events in the CIK-FIA «U18» World Championship. It has also devised a system for controlling evolutions – and thus costs – of the chassis, while taking care to preserve competition between the makes, and even to spur it on by introducing a title of World Champion Chassis Make. This worldwide recognition will go to the supplier of the chassis used by the Driver who wins the ultimate crown at the end of the three events.

The CIK’s idea was to freeze the chassis before the start of the competition, identifying 20 identical frames per make last June. The identification is not limited to the chassis: several accessories (rear shaft, rims, stub axles, hubs…) have also been marked, and only equipment that bears this marking may be used. Therefore, a Driver who has opted for one and the same make is guaranteed to have equipment that is consistent and, above all, identical to that of his direct rivals. It is therefore impossible to benefit from the privilege of a made-to-measure kart.

Stickers bearing multilayered holograms are used for marking the chassis and accessories; thanks to very advanced technology, they have this characteristic of revealing information that is invisi- ble to the naked eye when they are exposed to laser lighting by the scrutineers, and of self-destructing on any attempt to remove or transfer them! These stickers contain a code specific to each of the makes entered, so it is easy to identify the conformity of the equipment.

During the marking operations for the chassis and rear shafts, the CIK inspectors also had recourse to a sophisticated device called an «XRF analyser», capable of revealing by spectrometry all the components of the steels used and of checking among other things that the frames and axles presented by the manufacturers were of identical manufacture and quality.

It should be noted that this year, the «U18» chassis must conform to the rule which states that the tubes must be made from structural steel and not from non-alloy or low-alloy steel. The XRF analyser used by the CIK allows the detection of prohibited steel with an alloy content of more than 5%. As from 2011, the chassis in all of the CIK categories will have to comply with the stan- dards ISO 4948 and 4949 defining structural steels. A simplified control method, using calibrated magnets, will be introduced so as to avoid the sys- tematic, costly and inconvenient use of the XRF analyser.

Info CIK