Putting a 900cc Ducati Engine in a Go-Kart Has Predictable Results
If wheelies are your thing, then putting a Ducati engine in a go-kart is also your thing, it turns out
If you responded to an American asking if you wanted to see what they called their “900cc Dukarti” you’d probably rightly assume they’d wheel up a 916 or a V2, or perhaps they’re fairly interesting and you consider that they might have bored out an 851 slightly and done some ambitious rounding.
You’re probably not expecting a literal Du-kart-i, though.
But that’s exactly what the guys at the Cars and Cameras YouTube channel wheeled up to a minibike drag race.
Quite literally, it’s a go-kart with what we're told is a 900cc twin-cylinder Ducati engine, which is just a little bit more than the 125cc karts you usually see. Even a 250cc superkart might have trouble keeping up (at least in the straights).
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Driveability, as you might expect, is sub-optimal, though. With no clutch, it’s just push the throttle and go, with no real way to control the power. Combine that with a kart-sized wheelbase and the driving position - which basically has the driver lying down flat with their head and upper back more or less over the rear axle - and you get a result that means wheelies are essentially guaranteed from a standing start. Getting going actually takes the driver a few pumps of the throttle before the front end will actually stay on the ground.
Once the twin-cylinder does get going, though, it (fairly obviously) rips, and provides a soundtrack to surely make this one of the best-sounding karts you can find. Unless someone’s stuck a Norton F1 rotary motor in one, in which case let us know!
Image credit: CarsandCameras/YouTube.
