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Whilst the expedition to the Malacca track was a small group of four, looking back, I think we seriously enjoyed our time at the track.
For sure, we ended up waiting for just under an hour to have the track gates opened for us, no nearby lunch areas and a two hour journey up and down, but you kind of forget all that when you think back to how much fun you had driving the track.
The Malacca track is a state owned property that is leased out to an individual who rents it. How he actually makes a living from this track, I will never know, except that its definitely not from karting - in fact going to the track's Facebook page, you'd see that its more or less used for drift car and drag racing. The long straight and large number of flowing corners probably came in useful in that regard.
The track runs counterclockwise and has to my reckoning, 11 turns. Lengthwise, I assume its around 1.2km on the track we drove.
To me, this is just a great track to drive a kart on - it is a very flowing circuit and you are more or less always on the mid to upper part of the powerband. I do think given its flowing nature, its going to be a hard track to overtake unless the person in front makes a mistake or gets a "helpful" bump and messes up his corner. The corners are all very inviting and its easy to get some of them wrong given that the corner apex isnt what you aim for on many of the linked corners.
What I labelled as corners 8, 9 and 10 make me think of the Istanbul F1 track and the chain of long left hand turns - its really a fun set of corners to drive given that your engine (even a 125cc) is at max throughout much of these 3 turns.
Much of the circuit is flat though it appears that all that car drifting has taken a toll on the surface where you will find some corner entry/exit points a little bumpy.
For the trip up, we brought a new Rotax which we proceeded to run in - before we left at the end of the day, we took out a GPS to get a feel of lap times - from our GPS, the average lap time was about 44.5-45.0 sec a lap on a Rotax Max and top speed was just above 100km on a 12/83 sprocket ratio. In my opinion, I do think we could probably go down to a 81 or 80.
Unfortunately, I cant say exactly what was the fun kart timing as we never recorded that. The track has Subaru 4 stroke rental karts of which only 4 are serviceable.
Rental pricing is 100 ringgit for a track day if you bring your kart during the weekend. I believe the guys paid 50 ringgit each for 10-15 minutes of drive time on the rental karts.
