EX-F1 engineer Rob Smedley is trying to change the future of motorsport – with a little bit of help from Hollywood star Idris Elba.
Smedley, who worked at Ferrari and Williams, has launched the Global Karting League, an electric go-kart series targeted at youngsters – whose parents don’t have deep pockets.
The series, which kicks off in the UK, will offer kids the chance to turn up and race electric go-karts for a fraction of the price of traditional petrol karts.
Smedley, who is working with the Idris Elba Speed Academy, hopes the championship will give young racers the opportunity to reach F1 from different demographics.
He said: “I’ve spent all my life in Formula One and when I stopped with the teams I wanted to do something more purpose driven.
“One of the things that really interested me was how the majority of the drivers in F1 come from privileged backgrounds.
“And that only seemed to be getting more and more prevalent. I spent a lot of time looking at why and it comes down to grassroots level.
“If you want to participate and be successful, you’ve got to have a huge budget and that’s just prohibitive. A huge barrier.
“If you want to race at national level, you are getting into £100,000 and the next level and race in Europe, that’s £250,000 a year and it’s not open to anyone but ultra high net worth families.
“We started with a blank sheet of paper and wanted to massively reduce the cost and complexity and that’s how the Global Karting League was born.
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“It is about nurturing talent, creating a credible pathway through karting from the very grassroots and kids who’ve never done it before, to eventual world champions.”
Smedley says that unlike football, many potential star drivers have never had the opportunity to try their hand at racing.
He added: “If football was costing tens of thousands of pounds, we wouldn’t have found the immense talent across the years from different corners of the Earth.
“You wouldn’t have found Leo Messi, you wouldn’t have found David Beckham, Paul Gascoigne or George Best.
“We also have the Idris Elba Speed Academy. He’s somebody like myself who wants to give back.
“He wants to represent those underrepresented communities. We had 400 kids try out and we filtered that down to 12 kids with the highest potential and put them into the Global Karting League, and they are all fully-funded.”
One junior karter on the series is Sienna Greene, 15, from Coulsdon, who has the ambition of reaching F1.
She said: “I first tried karting at a birthday party when I was about nine and I won and a little later I joined a cadet programme at my local track.
“Working with Idris has been fun. He’s a lovely person, and he’s really down to earth.
“I prefer racing the electric karts to the petrol ones because if I do make a mistake, I find it easier to fix, compared to a petrol kart which takes longer to get back up to speed.”
