8 Friday March 18 2022
the timesFORMULA ONE
2022that he didn’t know how to pay. “And
Pérez just got into the next car that his
team had ready waiting for him.”
Yes, motor racing is littered with the
broken dreams of those whose parents
could not afford to have them fulfilled.
One point of these last anecdotes is that
they are all a decade-and-a-half old; the
cost of the sport and the amount
invested in children aged 6-16 has since
gone through the roof.
Could the Hamilton story ever happen
again? Hamilton won consecutive British
karting championships from the age of
ten before getting McLaren’s backing
aged 13. To fund those early years,
Hamilton’s father, Anthony, worked
three jobs simultaneously, one of them
selling double-glazing. But would that
hard graft allow a young Lewis, today,
from a normal working class
background, to compete with kids whose
karting is fuelled by a £100,000 annual
spend? Would he even have been
noticed? That is where O’Malley shakes
his head and says “No.”
Here, though, is a glimmer of hope to
leave you on. Rob Smedley is an
engineer who spent 20-plus years on the
F1 circuit until he finally left Williams in- “Yes,” he says, “it is becoming more
and more out of reach for all but the
uber-wealthy families.” One of the
reasons he left his last F1 job, with
Williams, was to attempt to democratise
it. Even just a bit.
He thus founded Electroheads, a
karting series for five to 16-year-olds on
electric karts. In Electroheads, karts and
engineers are all provided, so there is a
level playing field. It costs £450 for a
weekend’s racing; the wallet can’t buy
any advantage.
At least, he says, that can bring back
the middle-earners: “We’ve got kids who
were champions last year, who would
not have been able to afford to compete
in the British karting championships.”
All power to him then, because right
now, the Hamilton story is a one-off,
never to be repeated.
from his personal coach. In his one
Ginetta season, he finished third.
In some sepia-tinted past, dad and
lad (this is a very male paddock) duos
would be sharing golden time travelling
the country together with a kart in the
boot. O’Malley tried this with his son,
Josh, in the late Nineties. He knew, even
then, that this was karting on the cheap.
He would spend £8-12k a year on their
hobby. Josh did actually win one
national karting championship.
Yet Kevin knew that the only way for
Josh to go anywhere in the sport was to
pay for him to be placed with a team
who would have engineers travelling the
circuit, who would tune up the kart and
even, at the minimum, have awning
space so you could prepare the kart out
of the rain. But that would have been
three times the price.
When Josh was 18, and building a
reputation, he was offered a season in a
single-seater for £200,000. “Eventually,”
O’Malley says, “I said, ‘Sorry, Josh, I
can’t do it.’ ”
In the Noughties, Duncan Tappy was
another of the most highly-regarded
young drivers. He and his dad, a heating
engineer, were a two-man band; he came
third in the British karting championship
in 2003, which is considered an
extraordinary achievement given that
they had spent “only” £15,000.
In 2007, he won the British Formula
Renault Championship and then,
through a relation, got sponsorship from
Dubai. “Then the recession hit,” he says.
“End of funding. End of dream.”
Fifteen years ago, Alex Waters was
another highly regarded up-and-coming
talent. Invited to Estoril by Red Bull, in a
back-to-back test in the same F3 car,
both with new tyres, he was 1.2 seconds a
lap faster than another young driver by
the name of Sergio Pérez.
In 2007, in an F3 race at Oulton Park,
Pérez managed to drive both their cars
off the track, writing off the pair of them.
“I had to miss a load of races after that,”
says Waters, recalling the £50k repair billI
n the clubhouse of Rye House Kart
Raceway, above a racing car hung
proudly against the wall, there is a
picture of a beaming, young Lewis
Hamilton from his childhood days
racing here. A thousand and one
children will have been inspired by that
image and thought: I might be the next
Hamilton. The truth is, though, that they
never will.
There will never be another Hamilton
— never another British champion who
is not from an exceptionally high
net-worth background. Hamilton didn’t
open the door for others. If anything, it
slammed shut behind him.
The reason why first becomes
apparent in the club shop. You can start
karting in the “Bambino” class, aged six.
For that you need a helmet, which is
£389 before VAT. You also need a
racesuit, going at £120, and boots at
about £50. Oh yes, you need a kart,
which is £675, and if you want your child
to have a decent chance, the kart’s new
engine needs 20 hours on the dyno,
which is about £3,000. Yes, for your
six-year-old.
Aged eight, they will move to the
Cadet class where a kart is £4k, the
good engines can go for £10k but
have been known to go for four
times as much and the really
competitive kids (or rather their
dads) will have not one engine
but maybe four.
Some good — or rather
successful — Bambino class
drivers are having £60k a year
spent on them. The higher
spend for eight or nine-year-olds
is £150k.
Kevin O’Malley has co-owned
Rye House since 2004 and, before
that, would often see a young
Hamilton here on the track. He
now shakes his head in
amazement at where the game
has gone. He tries to put on affordable
starter karting here but says that, now,
only the wallet wins.
Hamilton’s story is itself something of
a miracle. He won his first British kart
championship aged ten and was then
talent-spotted by F1 royalty. I ask
O’Malley if that could happen today.
“Not in today’s world,” he answers.
“That’s the point and I don’t know
the answer.”
The talent pool for successful young
drivers has shrunk. It is now barely a
puddle. Just look at those who actually
have made it through to the F1 grid.
Lance Stroll’s father is a billionaire and
owns a 16.7 per cent share of Aston
Martin. That may have helped Stroll Jr
get his drive. Lando Norris’s father used
to be a regular in The Sunday Times rich
list. Nicholas Latifi’s father owns one of
the largest food companies in Canada.
Nikita Mazepin’s father is an oligarch
(which is why he is disqualified). Since
his early teens, and through a
connection of his father’s, Sergio Pérez
has been backed by TelMex owner
Carlos Slim, who has, at times, been the
richest man in the world.
Compare that to Glenn Denny who
appeared with his talented young son,
Oliver, in the Channel 4 programme:
Britain’s Fastest Kids in 2016 when Oliver
was eight. How far did they get? “We
stopped when he was ten,” Denny says.
Why? “I nearly went bust.”Denny runs a small engineering
company. He reckons it needed to be a
£20-30 million company for the dream to
work.
How did he ever think he could do it?
He hoped that McLaren would talent-
spot Oliver. Yet talent-spotting barely
exists, and only then in the early teens.
Hamilton only got his famous
sponsorship from McLaren when he was- That itself was a complete one-off.
Some F1 teams do have academies, but
if you consider it costs £250,000 a year
for a 14-year-old to race top-level karts
in Europe (plus home-schooling and a
full-time parent), or £750,000 to
£500,000 for a 15-year-old to race in
Formula 4, then a helpful contribution of
10 per cent from the team hardly
changes the accessibility. Yet the point is
this: even if you were to qualify for that
10 per cent, how would you have been
spotted in the first place? O’Malley says
he sees this all the time at Rye House:
“The better drivers are just getting their
arses kicked because someone else has
spent much more on a quicker engine.”
One of the best platforms for being
spotted, in the move up from karting to
cars, is the Ginetta Junior Championship
series, which starts at 14-year-olds.
When Norris was preparing for the
Ginettas, his father was hiring out
Bedford Autodrome so that Lando could
get head-to-head, one-on-one tuition
Hamilton, top, is pictured
in his karting days; they
launched his F1 career but
for the majority of young
kart racers at Rye House,
above, the dream of
emulating their hero will
probably remain just thatFinding the next Lewis? Forget it
Only offspring of the
ultra-wealthy can even
dream of a place
on the F1 grid,
writes Owen Slot
“
The talent pool
for successful
young drivers
has shrunk. It is
now barely a
puddle and
talent-spotting
barely exists
RICHARD SAKER/SHUTTERSTOCKfr
Gla
w
th
b
J
th
H h n J p w