Motorsport Week has sat down with Formula 1 stalwart Rob Smedley, to discuss his involvement in the FAT Karting League and how it could help a generation of youngsters achieve their racing dreams.
Rob Smedley has a secure legacy in the world of motor-racing.
A successful race engineer who saw him, by default, become the cream of the crop with a plum role at Ferrari, forming a close, notorious and fondly-remembered bond with Felipe Massa, which then carried over into his next venture at Williams.
After backing away from the sport, the Middlesbrough native, as F1 stalwarts go, seemed to be a warm but distant, memorable one, but quietly, in the background, he was making waves that might be helping to secure some futures for a huge number of budding young racing drivers.
He founded an all-electric karting series, initially known as ‘Electroheads Motorsport’. Smedley brought in Ferdie Porsche and FAT International, and it was duly renamed the FAT Karting League.
Its purpose is to ensure that young racing hopefuls are afforded, quite literally, a chance of being able to show their worth without the bank being broken. The initiative will enable many talents to keep racing and not be forced to abandon their dreams through every financial avenue becoming an insolvent cul-de-sac.
In an exclusive interview with Motorsport Week, Smedley explained that he quickly found the need to create this opportunity for young kids and what he learned along the way.
“I was in and around Formula 1 within the team environment and then I kind of backed out of that in, like late 2018, early 2019, because I wanted to pursue something different and that’s really where the itch with the grassroots started,” he said.
“I didn’t really know a lot about it; I didn’t know anything about it, to be perfectly honest. I had lived in the ivory tower of Formula 1 for 20 odd years and I think what is very starkly true, is in motorsport there’s Formula 1 and there’s everything else.
“Formula 1 is so far advanced in every single element you know compared to any other motorsport, that it was quite interesting to start understanding about other motorsports and the grassroots really intrigued me and there was a few incidents like that led to me wanting to get involved in it.
“But the principle was, effectively, [that] I’d been very close to drivers in Formula 1, and you see quite a disparity at times in talent. And then it was trying to understand what are the barriers for why we don’t see more diverse drivers involved in Formula 1, why don’t we see drivers from like emerging motorsport nations, why are there are some nations that are very strong, in say, ball sports, but there’s no crossover to motorsports.”
‘I wanted to do something about it’
Smedley explained that this experience of identifying how so many talented drivers have suffered through lack of funds, and the injustice he felt by it, that was the cause of his itch.
“It was all those type of questions that I wanted to try and answer and started to do a little bit of research and then understood very quickly that it was the biggest barrier is cost I would say there’s also a complexity barrier to, you know, the very lower tiers of grassroots, but principally, the barrier is cost.
“If it’s costing like a hundred thousand pounds, euros, dollars, post-tax, to do national level karting at a fairly midfield, mediocre level on the grid, there’s families who are spending much more than that, that just means that you’re never going to find talent – you’re only finding talent from a tiny demographic who can afford it. So that, to me, was wrong. I wanted to do something about it.”
The initial set-up of the initiative was a slow-burner, but the COVID-19 pandemic gave him time to reflect, getting some more finances behind it, plus getting the finer details ironed out, and the results were seismic.
“I kind of sat on it for a while didn’t really do a great deal and then post-COVID, up towards the end of ‘21, I put some money together, got some guys together from Formula 1 and we set about like trying to build a proof-of-concept to have a completely different way of going about it – take all the complexity out of it, build a credible and sustainable pathway and reduce the price point and we thought we’d probably be able to reduce the price point by 50 percent.
“Even 50 percent would bring many more families in, but what we actually ended up doing is reducing the price point by 96 percent, so we went from it costing £100,000, to do a season of national level karting to somewhere around like £4,000, which is obviously a huge discount and whilst we’ve stayed at four thousand, there or thereabouts, the incumbent owner-driver system is only getting more and more expensive and more and more inaccessible and out of reach.
“We ran it for a couple of years, just to see whether or not it would work in the UK, and that took us to the end of ‘23, and then clearly it did work, clearly there was a market for it because of course, there is a market, because what kid doesn’t want to go and get involved in motorsports?”
Smedley, now realising that there was significant and keen interest,
“So, there was clearly a market for it, and at that point, we then thought ‘OK, well let’s start to expand’. If we’re going to do this, then it has to be that we’re going to make systemic change. It has to be done on a global scale; it can’t be a provincial championship in the UK, so at that point, that’s when I got together with my current business partners.
“It’s all about bringing motorsport culture to a wider audience and making it and to a more diverse audience as well, so it’s the fusion of motorsport and cars but it’s also fusing fashion and music and art, which are all stuff that have a very wide base of interest and that was something that I always wanted to do with the Karting League – I wanted to make it quite cool, I wanted to make this for the kids, by the kids, not by some middle-aged man who thinks he knows what kids want.
“So that was that was a kind of a game changer, getting involved with my current business partners, and then we started to expand, so in ‘24, we spent a long time building a little bit more structure within the business, because running a provincial Karting Championship to running an interconnected global league are two very different propositions, so we said about building the technology and the infrastructure requirements, and then start of ‘25, we expanded so we went into the US we went to into the Midwest area and then subsequently, the California area, so now we had the beginnings of what is a global footprint.
“At the end of ‘25, we brought together all the best drivers into a World Final, and we crowned our inaugural World Champions. All at this fixed 95 per cent discount price.”
Starting young hopefuls on the F1 pathway
Smedley wasn’t done there. His aim was far bigger than just what he had already achieved – it was to now make sure that it was plied with enough technology to place itself at the forefront of another area on a tangent away from the racing side.
“Kids are getting exactly the same experience on track as they do in the incumbent system, but we also built a technology layer to it as well,” he said. “I wanted this to be like a super modern and fantastic customer experience and the the objective is twofold in the Karting League: to increase the base of the triangle and get many more kids involved you know we’re literally talking about orders of magnitude more kids involved in this sport on a global basis but also to have a system where we can identify recognise and nurture talent and set that on the pathway to superstardom out of karts and into cars, all the way up to Formula 1.”
FAT Karting League has recently had a new final stage which boasted a thorough format that will result eventually in an overall winner being handed a lucrative and huge opportunity in single-seaters.
“I’m sure you’ve seen that we’ve just we picked from the World Finals four drivers, selected the two World Champions in the two junior categories, and then two wildcards, and then we went and did a we carried out a six-day shootout evaluation on simulators, Formula 4 cars, psychometric testing, physical testing – it was very, very thorough, very, very data-driven.
“We want to be super data-driven about this as we are with our talent identification within the karting league, and yeah, we are ready to pick a driver who we will put into British Formula 4 next year, and fully fund the start of their pathway towards Formula 1. Every couple of months, there’s some seismic event that we are doing seismic change that we are we’re making to the grassroots of the sport in general and yeah it’s a really exciting time for us this year just to give you a flavour of what’s gonna happen this year.
“So we’re in three different markets now that will expand further in Europe, so there will be one or two areas slightly in Europe that we’re going to come into. So there’ll be championships in Europe, and there will also be more championships in the US as well. We will go to Texas in addition to the Midwest and California. We will be North Carolina and we will be in Florida so we’ll end up being in eight markets by the end of this year.
“Our ambition is in the next five years to get to 50 different markets in every single territory that you can think of and start having a truly global footprint with 50 to a 100 thousand kids coming through the programmeevery single year.”
Smedley aims high with his ambition, but with the major steps already taken, there is a high chance that his second legacy away from Formula 1 will give a plethora of talented kids out there to have a few of their own as well.
A second part to our exclusive with Rob Smedley will feature later this coming week on MotorsportWeek.com!
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