Collin Matiza — Seven of the most exciting and prestigious companies in Zimbabwe took to the kart track at the National Sports Stadium in Harare on Saturday to compete in the first round of the inaugural Duracrete one-hour endurance kart race.
The seven companies will compete over three one-hour races for the Duracrete Endurance Championship.
Duracrete, the title sponsor of the series, entered a team, as did Driptech, Touch Motors, CarTrack, Harden, Spraytech, and Pitstop.
A total of 35 drivers participated in the inaugural Duracrete company endurance challenge.
The morning race kicked off with teams picking the kart that the team would race. Soon, each team took to the track for a combined practice and qualifying session.
Team Harden was the pole sitter for the start of the race. During the race, each team had to make a minimum of four pitstops and four joker laps.
The Joker laps made use of a slightly longer lap, which took a little longer, but might extricate a kart from racing in traffic and could give a tactical advantage if chosen at the right time.
Each member of the team had to drive for a minimum of five minutes and each team had a minimum of four drivers.
After one hour of racing, Team Harden took the checkered flag, closely followed by Team Duracrete and Team Pitstop.
All seven karts crossed the finish line within four seconds of each other -- a close finish after one hour of racing!
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Pole Position Karts' focus is on bringing karting to Harare in a big way. Their "pyramid of progression" vision gives karting opportunities to youngsters as young as six years old right through to karting in international races, by way of leisure karting for those who just want to take part in rental karting for fun.
"The aim is to offer the opportunity to come karting to as many people as possible. Right now, anyone over the age of eight and taller than 1.3m can come to one of our venues and drive a rental kart for as little as six dollars.
"We have tracks in Eastlea and at the National Sports Stadium and are registered with the Sports and Recreation Commission to help us make our vision come true. We are open from Wednesday to Sunday for leisure rental karts.
"In addition, the track is host to Kart Sports Club, who last year saw member TK Mapiro racing in the ROK Cup World Championship in Italy and five other Zimbabwean karters racing in the inaugural African Karting Cup, a continental race meeting held in South Africa earlier in February," explained one of the race's organizers Kevin Dufty.
