This year’s championships were contested across two rounds at the Eastern Lions Kart Club and the Oakleigh Go-Kart Racing Club.

“Every year it gets harder,” he said.

“But the guy up stairs has honestly given me a gift that has allowed me to be good and competitive right from the get-go.”

Luciani finished on top of the podium at Oakleigh in order to take out the KA3 Medium class.

He said he was not competitive on the same circuit only two months ago.

“It is one of the hardest circuits in Australia,” he said.

“I knew I had to lose some weight – cut some alcohol out, cut some nice food out.

“I went there on three trips to do five days of training because it is a physically demanding circuit which would take a lot of energy.”

As well as cutting down his intake of red wine, Luciani walked up to 100 kilometres a week.

“I averaged about 75 kilometres a week and I lost four kilograms just so I could feel better,” he said.

“It’s those commitments that you need to make as you get a little bit older.

“It’s hard for a young person to do but they don’t need to because they are two or three tenths (of a second) faster just in youth.”

He also calculated he did more than 356 laps of the Horsham circuit over four days to build up his kart fitness ahead of the championships.

“Kart fitness is a different fitness,” he said.

“Football teams train twice a week, soccer clubs train twice a week, tennis players do eight hours a day and elite athletes do hours and hours and hours day.

“We’re exactly the same. If we want to win, we put in a lot of work.”

The 57-year-old’s passion for kart racing shows no sign of slowing down.

“What I’m most pleased about is that I put in that effort and I was rewarded,” he said.

“There’s nothing worse sometimes than when you put in the effort but things go wrong (that are) out of your control and you start to think, ‘what’s the use?’.

“It was really rewarding at the weekend.”