The Golden Ticket

If you’ve watched any of the Wonka films or read the book, you’ll know all about golden tickets. Willy Wonka hid 5 golden tickets in his Wonka chocolate bars. Anyone finding one would win a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and a lifetime’s supply of chocolate.

Well, golden tickets are a bit like Rotax exhausts. Yes they really are. You can buy an exhaust for your Senior Rotax kart racing-engine for about £350. They’re built in a factory in Gunskirchen, Austria. I can’t imagine a team of Oompa-Loompas working on the Austrian assembly line, but exhausts are pretty much hand built, and hand built means subtle differences. And subtle differences mean there’s a chance of picking up an exhaust that is way more powerful than others.

And like Veruca Salt’s search for a golden ticket, where her parents simply paid factory workers to open vast quantities of Wonka bars, there are serious Rotax racers out there who will buy a whole stack of exhausts and test them to find a good one.

There isn’t much that Ollie Hancock doesn’t know about Rotax racing engines, and he’s definitely the Veruca Salt of the racing world. Now, I’m not saying he has huge amounts of money, but he does buy a batch of Rotax exhausts and tests them.

His web site usedotk.com is currently listing a Rotax exhaust for £3000. This looks like a standard Rotax exhaust, but it produces more horsepower than a standard exhaust, and will give a driver an edge. Ollie’s own exhaust (which looks like it’s a hundred years old) produces even more horsepower, and will never be for sale.

Well, we’re the Charlie Bucket of the Wonka world. I bought a box of engine ancillaries (battery box, carburettor, loom, coil, exhaust etc) from Wright Engineering as spares for our main racing kart. In the box is a new exhaust. We haven’t used it yet. But who knows, maybe it’s that fifth golden ticket that Charlie found, and maybe it’s that performance edge that people are willing to pay thousands for. We’ll be practising and testing over the next few weeks in the run up to the Bayford Meadows BM Plate race weekend, and we can’t wait to find out if we’re going to get that lifetime’s supply of chocolate.