About TheKartLounge.com

The Kart Lounge is the brainchild of Keith Shampine, a lifelong kart racer, fan and webmaster for many karting businesses and series.

Realizing the absence of a central online location for road racing and 4-cycle sprint karting race results, recaps, news, schedules and general coverage, we created The Kart Lounge to try and fill that void.

Our goal is to provide racers an online hub where they can find comprehensive coverage and information on club, regional and national sprint and road race karting. This includes schedules, results, track guides, industry news, feature stories and event coverage in the form of preview and recap stories, audio and video interviews, photos and on-board video.

About Keith, in his own words

“I’ve been involved in karting basically my entire life. As youngster I tagged along with my dad, Ed, and his karting career first at upstate New York dirt tracks and then at enduro races up and down the East Coast at tracks including Pocono, Summit Point, Rockingham, Charlotte and Daytona.

Ready for a WKA Sprint start at Mid-Ohio, 2002 or '03
Ready for a WKA Sprint start at Mid-Ohio, 2003 or ’04

After a racing microds (quarter-midget style cars) throughout New York from age 5 to 13, I advanced to sprint-enduro road racing in the Yamaha Junior Sprint classes. This was 1998 at age 14. I won my first kart race at Summit Point in late summer of ’98 and won the Junior Sprint Heavy WKA national championship in 1999. I moved to the senior ranks in 2000 and competed in WKA national and Woodbridge Kart Club regional competition in Yamaha Sprint, WKA Sprint and the PP Can Sprint divisions. These classes were very competitive at the time and I was lucky enough to compete against some great racers – and win a few races – at many of the best road courses in the U.S.

In 2008 I relocated from my hometown near Syracuse, N.Y., to Charlotte, N.C., and soon after landed a job with the World Karting Association. I worked full-time at the WKA office for about six years and during that time processed memberships, wrote probably hundreds of press releases and race recap stories, helped manage public relations, calculated point standings, maintained the website, and helped manage the operations of races and events.

While working with WKA I also operated a small website design company called New Concept Media. I continue this business today and I’m proud to have a number of clients that make their business in the karting industry.

While I still enjoy driving karts from time to time (I have a good amount of laps at GoPro Motorplex), my main focus in karting is the development of The Kart Lounge and its coverage of sprint and road racing. We laid the foundation with coverage of WKA’s Daytona KartWeek in December 2020, and we’ll continue to build on it throughout 2021 and beyond.

TheKartLounge.com will never be a finished project. The development and evolution will be endless!”

– Keith Shampine