Arriving at the antiquated site of Shenington Kart Racing Club in rural Oxfordshire, conditions are decidedly sketchy. Early February, gloomy overheads, and a full unleashing of downpours. But four teenagers, plucked from 7,000, are unperturbed.
“What do you make of the UK?” I ask Jackson Wolny, a 16-year-old floppy-haired karter from Glen Ellyn, a village on the suburbs of Chicago. “Wet,” he laughs. “Very wet.” Yet it’s in this toughest of climates where Wolny and three others – two from the UK, one more from the US – start their six-day boot-camp to decide who will be FAT Racing’s first recipient of a British Formula 4 seat in 2026.
And most uniquely, in the elitist, expensive and often nepotistic ecosystem of grassroots motorsport, it will be fully funded.
But how did we get here? “I looked at the money to properly compete at the British Karting Championships and it cost around £100,000,” says Rob Smedley, a former F1 engineer with Ferrari and the founder of FAT Karting League. “And I was like, this is f***ed.
“If you’re paying £100,000 on one kid, someone next to me will have £200,000. They will have better engines, better karts. So you might have better kids, but they’ve just got better stuff.”
They say the cream always rises to the top, but at karting tracks nationwide, it’s often the chequebook. Financial barriers to progression up the motorsport ladder have always been omnipresent. By nature, motorsport is expensive, yet in junior ranks, performance is usually amplified by budget long before it’s defined by skill. Motorsport’s money problem: a tale as old as time.
“There shouldn’t be a £50,000 barrier for a 12-year-old to enter the sport,” Smedley details. A former race engineer for Felipe Massa (most famously the ‘man-in-ear’ when Massa missed out on the 2008 world title to Lewis Hamilton in Brazil), Smedley built a successful technology group, having left Formula 1 in 2018. But it didn’t get his blood pumping in the same way as the speed and sound of racing.
“Aggregated across championships in Europe and the US, it’s roughly £100,000 a year across national events,” he details. “At a European or World championship level, that’s more like £250,000. For anybody, that’s a lot of money.”
The sacrifices of families and parents have long been written into the narrative arcs of those who reach the top. George Russell’s father, Steve, sold his business to fund his son’s karting journey. Lewis Hamilton’s dad, Anthony, worked three jobs simultaneously to do the same.
On the flip side, Lance Stroll’s father, Canadian billionaire Lawrence, literally bought an F1 team in Aston Martin. F2 driver Cian Shields, son of Scottish businessman Seamus Shields (whose net-worth was put at £151m in The Sunday Times’ 2024 Irish Rich List), paid an estimated £2m to feature in practice for Aston at the Abu Dhabi GP last year, The Independent understands. Money doesn’t buy happiness, right?
Yet the cold, hard facts are that lucrative sums in the back pocket can buy opportunity in motorsport. As for teen prodigy Wolny, his background has certainly not been of blank-cheque privilege.
FAT KARTING LEAGUE
What is it? FAT Karting League is an electric karting championship with low, fixed pricing and an arrive-and-drive format that “puts the focus back on talent.”
Their aim? To remove the financial obstacles for under-resourced kids to progress up the motorsport ladder by slashing the entry price point by 95%. Their prize, after hosting regional, national and worldwide karting events, is a fully-funded Formula 4 seat.
Why is it called FAT? The racing brand is named after a 1980s French-German logistics company, Francais Allemand Transit, that sponsored racing cars, including a Le Mans-winning Porsche 962. It is now owned by Ferdi Porsche (grandson of the German car marque’s founder), who has teamed up with ex-Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley in forming this new project.
“We were in way over our heads,” says Wolny. “I missed so many days of school. My dad didn’t know how to pay for all the racing, so he sold his car and his die-cast business with his brother. He was putting in more time than me just to fund the whole thing.”
The problem is obvious; the solution perhaps not so clear. Enter FAT Karting League. A continuation of the F.A.T International racing brand, Smedley worked with Ferdi Porsche (grandson of the German car marque’s founder) after the Covid pandemic to formulate a new all-electric junior programme, which would provide a realistic entry pathway for kids in karting.
And, on the face of it, the business model is simple: lower the price point, increase the customer base.
“With our system, you can come and race with us in a junior-level kart for about £2,000 a year,” Smedley explains. “For all the testing and practice sessions as well, it’s around £5,000.
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“So it’s a massive discount, around 95%. How do we make that work? It has to be a business; it can’t be funded through benevolence. But by collapsing the price point significantly and with business partners investing, we’re in it for the long term.
“People aren’t investing with the expectation that this is going to do venture capital multiples. This is purpose-driven and, so far, it’s working. The probability of being able to find talent in a very large pool of kids is high.”
Launching for its inaugural season in 2025, FAT hosted numerous test sessions and race weekends across all three karting categories – bambino (aged 6-8), cadet (aged 7-13), junior (12-17) – in the UK and US, culminating in a world finals last December in Willow Springs, California. From that, four teenage drivers were selected to take part in a ‘Formula 4 shootout.’
How much does the traditional motorsport pyramid cost?
Karting (national) – £100,000
Karting (European/International) – £250,000
Formula 4 – £500,000
Formula Regional – £1m
Formula 3 – £1.5m
Formula 2 - £2m
Approximate figures per season
Alongside Wolny, Monde-Jnr Konini (Glasgow), Ellis McKenzie (Surrey) and Shea Aldrich (California) took part in a week-long assessment programme, modelled on ‘F1 driver-selection methodologies.’ As well as time on the karting track in Oxford, the teenagers underwent simulator work, strength and fitness testing and mental performance evaluation. Their boot camp concluded with testing in F4 cars at a circuit in Granada, Spain.
A few weeks later, Wolny was selected as the chosen one. After screaming in jubilation when told, the 16-year-old told Smedley: “I’m just telling you now, you made the right choice.” Alongside online schooling, he has been testing in F4 machinery over the last few weeks – and recently moved across the pond and into a rental property in Banbury, Oxford – ahead of his debut at Donington Park this weekend. A venue where his idol, Ayrton Senna, experienced one of his greatest days back in 1993.
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Such an opportunity would not have been possible without FAT’s involvement.
“We couldn’t come close to funding single-seaters,” Wolny says. “Even in karting, there were superior teams, people dumping money on engines and kids getting new chassis’ every weekend. But this chance in F4 feels a lot different.”
The early signs are promising, but Smedley knows the importance of continuous growth. He is looking to expand into the Middle East, India, China and Africa over the next few years. By that stage, the programme could involve 100,000 children. The company’s motto, both verbally and online, is: “We’re building a million-person race team.”
It is a meritocratic approach to dismantling motorsport’s old order. Yet like every pathway, there’s always a moonshot objective. On this, Smedley shows no hesitation in his ambitious, unwavering target: “In five or six years, we should have a kid who is either knocking on the door of Formula One or, better still, makes it to Formula One.”
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