Rob Smedley wants to make getting into F1 96 per cent cheaper…

Rob Smedley - once race engineer to Felipe Massa and orator of classic F1 phrases like “Fernando is faster than you” and “Felipe baby, stay cool!” - has launched a karting business that’s aiming to massively reduce the cost of getting into motorsport.

And we mean massively. His new Global Karting League - which’ll run 48V electric karts developed by himself and some other ex-F1 folk - will supposedly reduce the eye-watering financial barriers by 96 per cent. Wait, what?!

Let’s unpick that figure. Smedley explains that once kids have been kitted out with a chassis, an engine, tyres, spare parts and something to tow everything around in, they’re looking at a bill of £20k. Billionaire pocket money.

And that’s if you’re doing it on a shoestring. Those with deep enough pockets could fork out three times that, and so grassroots talent is filtered not by speed but by how much their parents can spend. Get to a national championship and you’ll need a six-figure budget. At European level? A quarter-mil, at least. And getting on for £3 million by the time a young driver is knocking on the door of F1.

Smedley sees “no reason” for this madness and reckons “the fastest driver ever has never actually sat in a racing car” because of it. “The cost to run a world championship is exactly the same as the cost to run a rookie championship,” he says. “So throughout this league system - which is completely meritocratic - the price point is fixed.

“The model that we deploy is a full service, so everything is taken care of. It’s a travelling championship - like all of the championships - but there’s no capital investment from the families.”

He reckons a weekend of racing in GKL could amount to £300, meaning a 10-round championship would be less than £3k. “There is no arms race,” he adds. “So the only differentiator is not your wallet, but the kid in the kart. There’s no way you can buy an advantage.”

Still not what you’d call cheap, but his research shows that it could open up motorsport to 1,000 times more 6-to-17-year-olds. Apparently four million kids will go corporate karting (y’know, your classic arrive ‘n’ drive, birthday party stuff), but only 2,000 are registered outdoor karters in the UK. Sheesh.

More on those karts. They’re “racing karts” says Smedley, because they have to provide a “credible pathway” for the Lewis Hamiltons of tomorrow. Packed with F1 know-how (“having key knowledge of the MGU-K system on a Formula 1 car means that we can replicate that in a go-kart”), they’re just as quick as any petrol kart but the voltage is low enough to be run safely at pop-up circuits in countries that might only have an old car park at their disposal.

Oh, and the equipment stays the same whether you’re a rookie or a pro in the making. “The beauty of the electric karts is we can turn [the power] right down,” Smedley explains.

Most importantly though, going electric means “significantly better numbers in terms of parity” than petrol karts. And that’s crucial, because the other prong of Smedley’s plan is to deploy F1-style data analytics to unearth and then nurture the best drivers. So the info fed back from the karts can be turned into virtual coaching, and the algorithms being used can even produce a global ranking.

“And at that point we can actually support that top percentile of talent that we’ve got coming through GKL. It’s part of why we’re doing this. So that by the time they get to the top of our system, they’re more than ready for cars and they can be super successful.”

And with Rob’s big book of F1 contacts, conversations with teams wanting to scout out those hidden gems are already underway. Yup, Christian Horner and Toto Wolff will be watching…

GKL has launched in the UK but is going global, and over the next five years it’s aiming to get one million kids into karting with up to 50 championships worldwide.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a few more future world champions who didn’t come from money…