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Piquet Sports - Track Review

One of the newest kart racing tracks in the USA is Piquet Race Park in Loxahatchee Groves, Florida. We ventured from Miami & AMR Motorplex to get to Piquet and now we're going to give you a review on the facility.

Now when you first get there, it's a little bit hard to see when you're entering the track. There's not these big fancy signs on the way in. But as soon as you arrive at the track, the first thing you notice, it's like an activity park. You have your kart racing facility, paintballing, they've got a rock-climbing wall and axe throwing. They've got food trucks set up for when events take place. So, if you go there for a buck’s party or corporate event, you can do a lot of fun activities at this place.

If you were to go to a racetrack, rather than just your family sitting on the sidelines and waiting between races for you to go out, there's activities there for them to do too. I think that's cool to engage other family members or friends to get a bit of a kickstart into karting as they’re already there. You can go and do other things.

I think it was only completed in January of 2023, so it is a very new facility. Unfortunately, it was quite bumpy on the racetrack. When they were paving it, they started putting the curbing in, they were driving over the track. I don't think the paving had settled that well which has caused the bumps in the circuit.

So with the heavy truck going across the track quite a few times, unfortunately it's left it quite bumpy and so from a driving point of view, it is quite annoying in places. Even just coming into the main straight in the anti-clockwise direction, it's a flat-out part of the track and it's not very hard, but you're basically just holding for dear life around some of these corners, which if it was nice and smooth, considering its brand-new layout, I think it's got potential to be one of the nicest racetracks in the USA. It's technical and it's quite tight in some areas, challenging the driver.

The full layout is a twenty-corner racetrack, with lap-times over a minute. But like I said, it offers a lot of opportunities to pass or to make mistakes. If you are driving the track, well it's set up well, you do have a distinct advantage on your competition. The track itself in an anti-clockwise direction, it's very fast and flowing turn one into a heavy braking zone and then you sort of switch back into another 180-degree turn. You sort of make your way through a fast left-hand corner and then you start going through a little bit of a chicane section where a couple of the curbs are smaller so you can attack them.

The rest of the track, there's some fast and flowing sections, there's some tighter corners that lead onto the main straight.

I really enjoyed my time driving the track itself. We just drove one of Piquet Race Parks Tony Karts, so that was easy to deal with. They were super accommodating at the track. Really happy to give us access to the full layout rather than what we started off with a few corners less. We got to drive that layout first and then he was happy to open it for us.

But I think in time if they do sort out some of those bumps in the track, I think it's going to provide a cool racetrack. I just think now for some of those faster classes, look, I don't know what it's like driving a cadet cart over those bumps, but man, a shifter kart would be wild, like an X30 was full on. So let alone going an extra 20 or 30 miles per hour, in some of those spots where I was hanging on for dear life, it must be incredibly difficult for a shift kart driver to keep their points lap after lap. The fatigue that you get from driving that track is intense, some of the most I’ve experienced.

Facility wise, they've got a couple of containers stacked up, so from a viewing deck point of view, I think that works okay and like I said, being so new to the USA kart racing facilities, they've got time to grow. It's not as if that's their finished product yet, and so I think that's going to work quite well. I'm excited to see how it goes over the next couple of years where they have some add-ons to the racetrack, to the outside facilities where they have pit garages that start to move in there.

The track offers rental karts, which is good to get newcomers on the track, then potentially into the racing karts. As I said, a lot of activities for the families to get involved in. Not just kart racing, but just having that nice family vibe so that you can take your family down there. Everyone can have a good day. A good experience is always going to help people get back into kart racing.

If you want to know more information about PK Sports Park, you can find them online at HOME | Piquet Entertainment & Race Park (piquetracepark.com).

If you guys need to know more information about the racetrack itself and how to drive the fastest way around the track, we've got a track guide on its way as well. So, this is going to give you exact braking points, exact accelerating markers of where we've driven. We're going to highlight the apex points, where to drive and where not to drive. You can find them online soon!

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