Rob Smedley: ‘We’ve got karting costs down by 96%’

It must feel strange watching your once arch-rival driving for the team you once called home. For Rob Smedley, former race engineer to Felipe Massa and all-round Formula 1 legend, that came just a week ago when Lewis Hamilton, the chap who snatched a drivers’ world championship away from his man on the last corner of the last lap at the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, emerged from Enzo Ferrari’s former home decked in red and raring to go for his first outing in a Ferrari F1 car.

If you followed the 2008 season as religiously as I did, soaking up all the on-track action and the pre-and-post-race gossip (this was the days before podcasts and Drive to Survive, remember), then you’ll know just how tense things became between the McLaren and Ferrari garages. Not quite to the ferocity of the Mercedes versus Red Bull conflict in 2021, but on-track scuffles in Turkey and Germany, as well as a tangle at the Japanese Grand Prix, sent tensions soaring. And that season’s drama was recently reignited, with Massa filing a lawsuit against F1’s governing body, the FIA, over that year’s Singapore GP fixing, the events of which ultimately led to him missing out on that year’s title.

Smedley, however, is well aware of how quickly the world of Formula 1 moves, even if the thought of seeing an old adversary at his former team looks a little strange at first. “Lewis stood outside the house at Fiaorano, a house where I spent many wet afternoons waiting for the track to dry up, [he’s] clearly now a Ferrari man. That looks a bit strange, that looks a bit different. But the reality is, by the time we’ve got to this week, Lewis is a Ferrari guy, and he’s probably always been a Ferrari guy in most people’s mind.” He adds: “I think it’s great that he’s gone to Ferrari. I think it shakes things up. I think he needed it. You know, looking from the outside and a little bit on the inside, I think that he needed it definitely.”

Besides, Smedley has bigger things to worry about these days, not least because he left the F1 circus behind a couple of years ago. Having followed Massa from Ferrari to Williams in 2014, he left the Grove-based team four years later and worked as a consultant to the Formula 1 Group. “I wanted some time to myself when, when I finished at the end of 18, going into 19, with Williams”, he says. “I did do a little bit with Formula 1 at the time, mainly because they asked me to. But I made it clear that during that period I wanted a) time to myself, and b) time to build [something] up.”

What he wasn’t sure of, however, was what it was he wanted to start building. “I started to think: ‘I was a kid from a fairly humble background [who] ends up in Formula 1, ends up in Ferrari, ends up winning all these medals and world championships and all of that stuff. How do you lower the odds for kids like me to get into Formula 1?’ And it quickly becomes a realisation that the system is actually democratised. If you’re clever enough, and if you apply yourself enough, as an engineer or technician or as a marketeer or whatever it is, you’ll get to Formula 1, right?”, all while conceding that it requires a good helping of luck, too. “What wasn’t fully democratised and isn’t fully democratised is the route to the driver’s seats in Formula 1. So that was something that piqued my interest.”

Now, motorsport has always been – and continues to be – astronomically expensive. Heck, if it weren’t for bored aristocrats mucking about in their motor cars on a Sunday afternoon, there may never have been a motorsport to get excited about. But that was a century ago, and the cost of entry now is arguably the highest it’s ever been, especially for youngsters looking to get a foot on the F1 ladder. “If you want to go out to Europe [and] you want to take part in the FIA European Championships, then an average spend out there will be like £250k”, he says. And it’s not hard to see why. Factor in a three-day race weekend, plus a few days of testing, five sets of tyres a day(!), chassis changes and “a significant amount of engines”, and it’s clear to see how costs can quickly snowball, particularly if you want to stay at the sharp end. 

True, there are plenty of families that can afford to do so, but it’s prohibitive for the majority of the world’s population, meaning the sport’s missing out on countless gifted drivers who simply don’t have the required means. That drove Smedley to create the FAT Karting League, in association with Ferdi Porsche’s new lifestyle brand FAT International (remember the name from the old Le Mans racers?), with the aim of drastically lowering the cost of entry for junior racing and bringing motorsport to parts of the world where there’s little-to-no infrastructure for finding young talent. 

How much cheaper are we talking? Well, Smedley originally estimated that he could bring costs down by 50 to 60 per cent, but, he says, “we’ve ended up getting it down to 96 per cent and we haven’t stopped.” An impressive achievement, although it’s one that’s required a complete rethink of the karting system. Naturally, one of the major hurdles has been the cost of the karts themselves. Currently, there are multiple manufacturers and tyre suppliers that compete in the karting world championship, likely with their own advantages and disadvantages. Meanwhile, everyone who competes in the FAT Karting League does so in the same machinery as their competitors, which has been designed by Smedley and his team, while manufacturing is handled by longstanding kart maker Birel.

Each kart is powered by an electric motor, which varies in power depending on what level you’re at in the league. “It was clear to me that EV technology offered probably the best chance of getting the close parity across the whole fleet,” Smedley says. “When we were first doing the research on this and started to look at internal combustion engines and EV engines and all rest of it, we just couldn’t get the parity across the ICE engines. [We] understood how to do it, but it would be a significant investment [to make it work]. So that’s why we ended up with the EV karts.” Parity is particularly important, not only because it’s an arrive-and-drive format, meaning you could end up in a competitor’s kart in your next race, but it also takes the variables out of talent-hunting process. 

That’s arguably the league’s USP over traditional karting, with data playing a key role in how it assesses the F1 champions of the future. “You look at the classic way of selecting a driver. It’s kind of looking at their results, going and watching them at the side of a track, and seeing whether or not that kid’s good. Just from eyeing it up”, he says. “I’m all about finding the talent, but I want to find it in a really data-driven and objective way.” To that end, Smedley and his team have developed software that can analyse data points on the kart and around the track, and log them into a database with other drivers across the world.

Those who show signs of speed during the arrive-and-drive testing phase will be selected for the regional and pro championships, with the top scorer eligible for a fully-funded Formula 4 seat. This year marks the expansion into the USA and the league’s first World Final, where the best drivers from both markets will compete on the same stretch of tarmac for an almighty title decider.  Ultimately, the goal is for a truly global structure, where kids all over the world have the opportunity to light up the timing screens and grab the attention of FAT Karting League’s talent-o-tron.

For now, Smedley’s message to boys and girls with dreams of being an F1 driver is simple: “we’re open, come try us.” It all starts with a test day, which lets you crack on with learning the kart and build up speed without the pressure of going up against competitors in a full-blown race. And while the traditional karting scene can be intimidating to newcomers, particularly young girls coming into a paddock full of boys and pushy dads, Smedley’s strived to make FAT Karting League an open, inviting space that’s welcoming to all. “I think everybody always has the same feedback, it’s the community spirit here, the feeling of belonging, the feeling of equity, is really, really strong, and that’s great”, he says. “That’s exactly how a movement like this should be.”

Get up to 25 per cent off your first full FAT Karting League test day by filling in the form here and mention PISTONHEADS when prompted.