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When E-Volt Racing Matakana opened on March 15 at Matakana Country Park it was electric – and not just because its EcoVolt GT karts run on cutting-edge battery technology.
The driving delivered all the excitement you’d expect from karts that can reach speeds of up to 70km/h with some hair-raising racing on the purpose-built, 300-metre outdoor track.
Matakana Country Park and E-Volt Racing owner Brendan Coghlan says the electric karts were designed and manufactured in London with the assistance of Formula 1 engineers.
The karts have F1-style steering wheels and offer exceptional performance with instant acceleration plus push-to-pass boosts to test the skills, not to mention mettle, of any would-be race car drivers.
“We’ll start you on level two. When you’re confident at level two we’ll take you to level three. Once you’ve done a few laps, we can actually take you to level four. So you’ll go faster each time,” he says.
In total Coghlan imported 10 electric karts from manufacturer BIZ Karts in England.
“We wanted a good, solid car that’s just going to last, because Kiwi drivers are notorious for breaking things.”
He says his is the first outdoor track in the world to use the BIZ Karts EcoVolt GT electric karts, with up to eight racing at one time, and two fully-charged karts in reserve in case of breakdowns.
“The track marshals have hand-held devices that can override the cars so if someone’s being an idiot we can just slow them down, we don’t have to wave flags. We can also control them from a desktop computer.
“If we’ve got a crash, we can slow down that whole zone. The technology has made racing karts a lot safer – safety is paramount.
”The karts have roll cages and racing seat belts, and before drivers can get behind the wheel there’s a compulsory safety briefing and an instructional video to watch.
A track marshal straps everyone into their karts, checks all the helmets and the safety belts, then checks the helmets again – only then can the fun begin.
Unlike their noisy petrol counterparts, you can almost hear a pin drop when the karts are racing, even with a packed field.
“You hardly hear the karts. They’re pretty much silent, because it’s all run on electricity,” Coghlan says.
The lack of loud combustion engines also means “there’s no emissions, no fumes chemicals, and no petrol”.
As the name suggests, the EcoVolt GTs are eco-friendly.
“Petrol, fumes and noise wouldn’t have fit in with the area – we’ve got something like 20 horses on the property, the café and Sculptureum across the road. We wouldn’t have done it if it was petrol,” he says.
“So the electric karts are perfect for the rural setting, there’s no harm to the environment.
“For us, it is all about sustainable tourism. Basically, we ticked all the boxes with the electric karts. We go through Meridian Energy, and all their electricity comes from renewable supplies so that ticked another box.”
A 10-minute charge provides a 10-minute ride, a one-hour charge provides a one-hour ride – it’s roughly one-to-one, Coghlan says.
“Races are 10 minutes and we have a 10-minute gap in between each race when the karts are charging.”
It’s not just the karts that are sustainable, but also the track.
“The track is made out of concrete because asphalt does leach a bit, but with concrete there is none of that.”
To design the track, Coghlan watched hours of YouTube, researching the best layouts in the world and listened to countless interviews with kart drivers to see what courses they liked and why.
“So we actually built the track around the existing trees, which is different to other outdoor tracks. We tried to keep as many trees as possible. We’ll have tyres around them to protect them,” he says.
“Normally everyone cuts the trees down, you go to a kart track and they’re quite bare. Keeping them was another way to fit in with the character of the area.”
Info: E-Volt Racing Matakana, Matakana Country Park, from March 15, 10am. $49 for 1 race, $79 for 2 races, $99 for 3 races. Must be over 12 and at least 150cm. https://www.evoltracing.co.nz/
