New Member Intro - From Scotland!
New Member Intro - From Scotland!
Good day from bonnie Scotland. [Although I did spend several wonderful years in Sydney and Perth - raced at Eastern Creek and Wakefield - miss Australia so much]. I came across this site while researching magazine content for a rallying book that I was authoring. recently. As a result of my interaction with the website a member Brian [BW2520] from The Australian Motorlife Museum in Wollongong very kindly scanned the content from a series of magazines that I needed from his collection. I really appreciated his very generous assistance ....all the way from the other side of the world.
As much as I love reading motoring and motorsport magazines of all types, [I recently received a donation of a near complete collection of Motor Sport and Autosport magazines - 1950-2006] my speciality is kart racing and more particular the early sixties and the history and heritage of the sport, particularly in the UK, but with a worldwide interest.
As with many of today's magazines the advent of the internet spelled the death knell for two of karting's most iconic magazine's "KARTING" in 2016 along with KART & SUPERKART" magazine even earlier in 1991.
As a former FIA Race Director and Competitor in both cars and karts I have been involved in motorsport for over 50 years. And for some time now I have been really concerned that today's racers have little awareness about the sport's history, heritage, and early development, and that all this history and the origins of karting will also be lost to future generations of young enthusiasts.
So, I decided to do something about it - I acquired the rights to both magazines and since retiring a few years ago I have been striving to capture, preserve and promote the history of karting for future generations. To achieve this, I have set up a not-for-profit- project - The British Karting Heritage Project - www.britishkartingheritage.com which has been established to "Give British Karting History a Future".
I have converted my garage into an archive library [see photos] and having raised over £4,000 for professional scanning equipment, I am currently scanning 56 years of karting magazines and ready to make all the magazines fully accessible on a bespoke and searchable archival website - where the magazines can be read using the latest 'flip page' software application. I'm currently fund raising to finance the website build costs and hope to have the complete collection of 1,000+ of both magazines online by the end of the year or early 2026. I have widened my scope to include some of the other short lived and more obscure karting publications.
A very long shot I know but any early UK karting magazines, books, or programmes or other items of historic interest [the obscurer the better!] which may have found their way overseas - would be a welcome addition to the project.
Cheers and thanks for reading!
