You aren't old enough to drive cars yet, but you can drive Go-karts!

Go karts are fast, exciting and easy to handle, and there are tracks all over the country catering to every age range. Many of the best Formula 1 race car drivers got their start racing karts as teenagers.

Here's a typical go kart that you would find at a local track. This one has a fiberglass body weighing about 40 pounds, and the whole kart weighs about 400 pounds. To save weight, racing karts are little more than a seat, a steering wheel and an engine bolted onto a frame.

Here's the kart with the body removed:

The engine, clutch, transmission and brakes are all in the back of the kart. The steering wheel and steering linkages, the brake pedal and the accelerator pedal are located in the front.

Power for this kart comes from a 6.5-horsepower, gasoline-fueled, 4-stroke Honda engine. On top of the engine is a 2.5-gallon fuel tank. These karts have a maximum speed of 17 to 18 MPH, but it feels a lot faster because of how low you are to the ground and how tight the track is.

Here's another view of the engine, with the transmission and drive belt on the left:

The white box in the upper left of the photo is a radio-controlled kill switch for the engine. If a driver gets a little too crazy, people on the track can shut that kart down.

Power comes out of the transmission to a small pulley. A rubber belt with "teeth"connects the small pulley to the big pulley.

The big pulley bolts onto the axle of the left rear wheel, which carries all of the engine's power to the ground.

Here's what's inside the transmission:

The shaft on the right connects to the same small pulley seen in the previous photo. On the left is a control device called a centrifugal clutch. It hooks to the engine's drive shaft.

When the engine revs up, the weights on the clutch fly outward, applying pressure to the clutch plates and sending power to the rear tire. When the engine is idling, the weights stay toward the inside, and no power makes it through the clutch.

Eventually, you need to stop, so this kart has two disk brakes on the rear wheels.

When you mash the brake pedal, it pulls the rod on the right. The rod pulls on the silver lever of the brake's master cylinder. That lever pulls on a piston inside the master cylinder. This piston pressurizes the brake fluid and clamps the brake pads onto the disk that you can see next to the tire.

FunWerks in Raleigh, NC, provided generous assistance in preparing this article.