Goodwin keen to ditch letter of the law to rule the road

Jay Goodwin is a young man undoubtedly on a mission, and though he is only eleven, Jay is already displaying prodigious promise, having taken his first tentative steps on the motor racing ladder three years ago. A trip to his local karting circuit quickly showed that what had initially looked like being just a new hobby would soon develop into something rather more serious.

“I always wanted to try karting when I was little,” the Ashton-upon-Mersey ace related, “because motorsport runs in the family, and when I was eight my dad took me to Daytona Raceway in Manchester. When I went for the first time, to be honest I didn’t really think I would be that good, but I really enjoyed it – even if the vibrations and the speed were pretty scary!

“After that my dad bought me an outdoors kart and we started out in a team called Turbo, though we didn’t get out to practise that much at first. Now we’re properly into karting, we realise we should probably have gone out quite a bit more to begin with.”

Be that as it may, the young charger has been making rapid progress, as he follows in the footsteps of his father Geoff and brother Wesley. Both have raced BriSCA F1 stock cars, and the latter has also competed successfully in Moto-Cross – but Jay, you sense, has altogether loftier ambitions still.

After successfully completing his Association of Kart Racing Schools (ARKS) test, the St Ambrose College pupil took to the track competitively for the first time at Three Sisters near Wigan, going on to race in the national BRDC Stars of Tomorrow and Super 1 championships in 2007, the former being the same series that first set Hamilton en route to where he is now. With so little mileage under his belt, though, he soon realised that he was out of his depth.

“We did half of that year in cadets,” he explained, “with my dad throwing me into the deep end in Stars and Super 1. Near the end of the year we had to drop out of Stars because I wasn’t experienced enough to handle it at that point, but I think racing nationally provided me with a much higher level of competition. I was out there all the time with all the quick lads, which was a lot to contend with.”

Indeed it was, and after stepping down to the club racing scene for the remainder of the campaign, Jay returned to Stars in 2008 with a vengeance, as a works driver for the crack Zip Young Guns squad. Whilst he has invariably been there or thereabouts, he has found his efforts stymied by persistent carburettor issues, his weight – he is 7kg over the recommended weight for the cadet class – and a broken hand, after falling over during the prestigious ‘0’ Plate meeting at Rowrah back in May.

“I was out for a month after that,” he rued. “I still raced the next day, but when I came in from one of the heats it was hurting too much to carry on. It was really swollen, so we went to hospital and it turned out I had broken it…”

With the nature of cadet racing penalising heavier drivers, the decision was made mid-season to move Jay up a notch into the more powerful Mini Max class – where rather than being a disadvantage, his weight would play to his strengths.

As one of the youngest drivers in the category – up against rivals as much as five years older than him – time is undeniably on his side, and beyond Mini Max he expects to progress through the ranks into Junior Max and KF3. Following that, he says, he will look at possibly the sportscar-based Playstation Ginetta Junior Championship when he turns 16, before moving into single-seaters and, who knows, maybe even ultimately earning himself a place on the grand prix grid alongside Hamilton..?

“Last year was just a learning curve really,” Jay summarised, “but in 2009 we’re going for a top ten finish in Stars – or a seeded number at the very least – and the year that after we’ll be going for gold.

“I would like to stay in motorsport in the future, but if I’m not a driver I’m working hard in school to be a lawyer.”

Something tells you, should he carry on the way he’s going, those law books won’t be necessary…

Photo: Chris Manson

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