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Where is the next Hamilton coming from? (and how much will it cost)
As part of an article profiling Lewis Hamilton and his early career, Toronto’s Star uses Autosport’s estimate of how much it costs to get to F1 compared to other major sports:
- £4,800 - NBA player
- £60,000 - NHL player
- £144,000 - PGA Tour
- £192,000 - Olympic figure skater
- £3.90M - Formula One
To most people, that’s a crazy amount of money, and Lewis knows how lucky he is to have had McLaren pay so much of it. But most aspiring racers find that raising money to race karts in Europe is the biggest hurdle, even though the costs are relatively small compared to, say, F3. The budgets people have mentioned to me this range from £30k to £200k, and I’m sure there are others on either side of that range. But Lewis repeatedly talks of the influence karting had on the development of his talent.
After the excitement of a grand prix, testing must seem like a chore. Does it make him a better racer?
‘I don’t think so,’ he [Lewis] says, preparing to close the laptop. ‘You get that crafting from karting, the wheel-to-wheel racing you have there.’ Karting is where most successful racing drivers first turn a wheel in anger; the competition is ferocious.
(Observer Sport Monthly, June 2007)
In the same article M-Sport/Zanardi Kart UK’s Keiran Crawley remembers Lewis coming through the field in a European JICA race after stalling (they had standing starts in those days):
“I got the starter into the side pod just as the lights went to green. Lewis went off from the back of the grid and was already half a lap down. He caught the pack and went through it to finish fourth. He was up against some very good drivers - including Robert Kubica, the Pole who is now an F1 driver for BMW - and beat them. In F1 we haven’t seen him come from the back, but that’s when he’s at his most dangerous. When he makes mistakes, just watch him go. I want to see him make some mistakes - then you’ll see just how good he is.”
But drivers looking to learn their craft in the elite categories of European KF3, KF2 and then KF1 face the obstacle of finding the sponsorship to race in a type of vehicle most companies more readily associate with an annual jolly at an indoor track. Lewis and Anthony Hamilton are waging a two man campaign to publicize just how challenging and exciting karting is but without media coverage beyond the specialist karting press there will be no new sponsorship money to give normal-income kids a chance in the sport. It’s by no means easy to attract the funding for FBMW, FRenault or F3 but it has been done. It’s vanishingly unlikely in international karting, even though the sums needed are much smaller.
Additionally, the decrease in the amount of racers over the last few years has had an effect on the revenues of the kart manufacturers and their willingness to pay professional karters to show off their product. Eight years ago there were 20+ professionals in the top class, now there are five or six.
In some countries the national governing bodies have attempted to bridge the gap. In France, the FFSA supports nine young karters through the Equipe De France scheme. They don’t rush them through to car racing as soon as possible, in fact they seem quite happy to support drivers who are aiming to become professional kart racers (but that’s another story). Either way, it’s cold, hard cash getting spent on giving drivers invaluable karting experience against the best in the world.
In the UK, the MSA runs the Race Elite development scheme, but limits this to providing training and non-financial support for car racing. If they get a World Championship from any of this year’s crop other than possibly Turkington I will give up beer for a year (some people reading this know how much that means…), whereas there are some astoundingly talented British karters out there at the moment.
Luckily McLaren have again stepped in with support for Ollie Rowland, but the MSA won’t support individuals financially for fear of generating a good old British bout of mean-spirited envy. It’s a shame we haven’t evolved past that, but Hamilton got the snarking in spades and it made him stronger.
The MSA could do a lot more for elite motorsport in the UK and all the evidence points towards international karting being the most effective place to focus that effort. Maybe they don’t have the money to do what the French do for their drivers, but I don’t believe the resources aren’t there to get a bit of major exposure for our European Championship contenders. If we capitalize on the Hamilton effect we can start the ball rolling to build a following for karting and the sponsorship money will follow.
Update: F1Fanatic has made this their post of the week - Thanks Keith!
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Posted on June 9, 2007 by Mary-Ann Horley in the category.
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Reporter: Mary-Ann Horley
Mary-Ann covers most of the major international races for Karting Magazine, Kartlink and Kartcom.fr as well as being a web designer for some of karting's top drivers and teams.
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