Karting Lap Time Statistics: What 104 Shared Sessions Show

The fastest lap tends to come late. In short sessions of 5 to 10 laps, more than half of the best laps we looked at came in the last three laps, and about one in five came in the first three.

That's one of three things that jumped out when we went through the karting lap time statistics for 104 sessions that drivers chose to share publicly on the Race Ninja showcase, from 25 drivers at 39 tracks. Nothing from private sessions is in here. The "when" numbers use all 104. The sector and corner numbers use the sessions that had that data, and each section says how many.

Which lap is usually the fastest in a karting session?

Usually one late in the session. Across all 104 sessions, the median best lap came two-thirds of the way through. More than a third landed in the last three laps (37 sessions). About one in nine came in the first three.

One thing to bear in mind with short runs. In a 5 or 6 lap session the last three laps are half the session or more, and there's no middle under this split, so a late best lap is partly just how the buckets fall. In longer sessions the best lap still tended to come past the early laps: lap 11 in sessions of 11 to 20 laps, lap 14 in sessions of 21 or more.

Lap times alone can't tell us why. Tyres and brakes coming up to temperature, the track rubbering in and a driver learning the lines all push the same way, and every session mixes them differently.

But the practical point holds whatever the cause. If you're three laps into a short session and you're not where you want to be, don't write it off. In 5 to 10 lap sessions the best lap was usually the 6th one.

How much time is hiding in your best sectors?

Add up a driver's best time through each sector and you get their theoretical best: the lap they'd do if every good sector landed on the same lap. Three quarters of sessions finished at least 0.25 s short of it.

In the median session, the best lap was 0.57 s slower than that driver's theoretical best (102 sessions, 24 drivers). In a quarter of sessions it was 0.96 s or more, and in 57 sessions, more than half, the gap was over half a second. A track split into more sectors can open a bigger gap, because there are more chances for one good sector to stand alone, and the 0.57 s mixes those layouts together.

The median lap time in those same sessions was 0.64 s off the best. So the time drivers had already shown, in pieces, was most of the gap between their median lap and their best one.

That's the same pattern as the two drivers we compared in how to go faster in karting, whose sessions are in this set too. Driver A's best lap was 0.75 s off their best sectors, a little above the middle. Driver B's was 1.67 s off, well into the top quarter.

And the fix is free. Look at your sector times, find the sector you only nailed once, and work out what was different on that lap.

Where does a typical lap lose time against the best one?

For each session we took the best lap and the lap closest to the session's median time, the typical lap, and compared them corner by corner (91 sessions with corner data, 23 drivers). That typical lap was a median 0.64 s slower.

Then we picked the corner where the typical lap lost the most time. Of course it was slower there. That's how we picked it. The interesting part is which measures moved:

The clearest difference is speed at the slowest point. Peak braking didn't drop, and on the typical lap it was a touch higher if anything. That's the hardest braking measured inside this one corner, so it doesn't tell us whether the driver braked in the same place or for as long. What it does say is that on the typical lap, drivers weren't braking more gently. They got to the bottom of the corner with less speed, and four times in five they left it slower too.

Where the slowest point sat doesn't settle it either. It was further from the apex on the typical lap in just under half the sessions (47%). That's distance only, so it doesn't say whether it moved before the apex or after it. If you want the driving side of this, tip 2 in how to go faster in karting covers the slowest point and the apex.

How did we work this out?

Every number here comes from karting sessions that drivers made public on the Race Ninja showcase, timed up to 27 October 2026. Private sessions aren't included. We left out our own test accounts, counted duplicate uploads of the same session once, dropped anything at a car circuit or with a best lap of 100 s or more, and needed at least five racing laps in a session to include it. A racing lap is one within 107% of the session's best. That usually knocks out the out-lap, the in-lap and a lap with a spin or a stop, though a quick in-lap can still get through.

The "when" figures count every timed lap in the order it was driven, slow ones included. Sector times were only used where a lap's sectors add up to its lap time (within 0.1 s) and the session's best lap had them. Corner speeds come from the camera's GPS, which a GoPro logs about ten times a second and a DJI camera less often, so corner figures from DJI sessions are coarser.

Two limits worth knowing. These are sessions drivers were happy to share, which may tilt things. And 23 to 25 drivers is a small sample, so treat this as a first look. We'll rerun it as more drivers share sessions and update the numbers here.

For the bigger picture of what you can measure from a camera, logger or timing sheet, see karting data. If you want the same corner-by-corner breakdown for your own session, kart racing analysis does it from your footage, and improving karting lap times with data shows how to read it.