Not a gearbox kart, but something I modeled from memory as best I could roughly based on a prokart. It's low-poly as it was meant for a game rather than renders but if any use.................
Yup, low-poly.. the kart itself is only 9,502 polys (triangles).. no smoothing modifiers just a single smoothing group and was intended as the high-level LOD.. on-par in the poly count with normal cars. It could be optimised still, but gave up after discovering the physics weren't gonna work well for it.
I didn't count the polys on the wheels separately (forgot) but attached the wireframe so can be seen anyway.
As for the mirror stuff, I just knocked it up quickly as a kinda "motorshow stand" type thing. As I say, it was intended for game usage and I didn't spend much time on the scene for rendering
I only had a quick crack at the prokart as one of my ex's and family were pretty into karting.. she ran prokarts and her younger brothers ran TKM 100s and a cadet series. I worked as a kart mechanic for a few years and this was basically how I remembered them (probably 8 years or so ago now).
Dunno if I'll model another one but if I do, I'll try and find some reference next time
In all honesty if you take the wheels out of the equation then something of that standard should be achieveable in 300-400 polys by a freeware game author so at 10k polys it's not game standard.
However we must remember that Go karts are notoriously hard to model as there is so much small detail, they're a very difficult subject matter for a 3d modeller - and you get a +1 from me for picking a pro kart and doing a reasonable job of it .
Chassis etc less wheels is ~5.5k (965 polys for each wheel). I set the limit up as 10k in 3DS as that's my general target for rF which seems to be about standard for that, but I know a lot of polys could be saved on the likes of the stub axles, steering wheel and remove a few of the sections of the chassis tubing near the front wheels (only orignally added to aid bending) for starters.
I'm a n00b modeler too really although poking about for a while, I still have a _lot_ of practice to do before I become what I'd call "good"
I guess if I had used some blueprints or the likes I may have done it a bit more conservatively but every poly was just made up as I went until I looked ok in my mind.. but there's plenty of flaws in it too
Prokarts are sweet IMO. I've driven a 250cc gearbox kart too on an airport which was definitely different, but the prokart proved to be the most fun in general