The reason I explain this is because I am not anti-money-earning. I know the game very well, because he who has the tyre distribution rights… wins. I know this all too well. In karting, tyres basically equal power. They are an expensive, disposable, yet essential product and the number one spend on any weekend for most competitors. You have an exclusive contract to supply tyres for a class, you’re going to be doing alright. But this is essential if you want to invest back into a project.

However, when we get to a macro level and we’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors, questions do start to get raised.

One of karting’s biggest problems is shame or embarrassment. It’s very difficult to describe to anyone that you do karting without over-explaining it. Obviously, when major governing bodies describe it as the first step on the ladder, it doesn’t help matters, because now you have to explain why you do a kid’s sport.

So naturally, if you find someone who does KZ, you’ll hear, “It can do 100mph,” or “It does 0–60mph in three seconds,” as if anyone cares. The default one I hear most from most karters is, “Actually, it’s really physical.” This is a badge of honour. If all else fails, you need to describe how “physical” it is, because it’s physically difficult. It’s not just “go-karts.” It’s the same habit as when karters start talking about F1 drivers who raced karts. This is one of the unfortunate, yet inherent, weaknesses within karters. The value has to be some exterior factor that doesn’t actually get to the heart of what make karting, well, proper karting for me, so good.

Now I am not anti-grip nor am I saying karting shouldn’t be physical. I am pro-hierarchy in many aspects. A tyre war at the top of the sport? I am all for it. That’s the best of the best of the best, sir. I am very much talking about the karting pyramid here, if there actually was such a thing (there isn’t really any more).

The absurd thing about karting, especially if you look at the major clubs, is that they are, in effect, running soft rubber for most if not all senior classes. Technically, it’s CIK Medium or CIK Hard, but in the real world, it’s soft. We are talking way, way, way softer than any normal person could cope with. This is what you race in Rotax or X30 for the most part at most clubs in the UK. I don’t particularly like these classes, but in the absence of anything actually decent, this is what we have to deal with.

If you roll back the clock to the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the tyres were narrow and pretty low-grip. The sport wasn’t any worse for it at all. It was more popular, in fact. I am very much into the concept of good hassle and bad hassle. Good hassle is what makes something addictive; bad hassle is something that puts people off. So good hassle is getting a 100cc engine to work right. It’s hard to do, but worthwhile. Bad hassle is having to navigate some insane bureaucracy before you can get racing. Good hassle, bad hassle — got it?

Physical intensity kinda fits in between the two. Too little and the activity is kind of weak and dull, but too much and it’s impenetrable. For most clubs, any adult newcomer is basically being asked to start the sport like a boxer having to go straight to a 12-round bout.

Yet, in motorsport, going faster is “better.” Now, there are complexities to tyre regulations over the years that I won’t go into, but I will talk about the human urge to “go faster.” It takes quite a bit of psychological strength to look at a lap-time sheet and see your class is slower than the top junior class by five seconds, for example. This is why high-grip karting is rarely questioned.

This is karting’s perennial problem. You have internal psychological market dynamics that cause shifts, which in turn cause external market dynamics that work against karting. Think 100cc being dropped for Rotax. For those who switched, it was their choice to make, but you get subtle secondary effects that actually result in an overall decline in the sport.

So with tyres, there’s huge psychological “faster is better,” but this comes from within - from people already in the sport, and already conditioned to it.

It doesn’t matter that the tyres don’t last as long, or that newcomers are battered to within an inch of their life.

Yet somehow we enter a realm where some people are now spending £400–500 (new race set and practice set with a used set for early testing) a weekend on tyres at club level, which is utterly insane. Some of this is conspicuous spending, for sure, but some of it isn’t.

Karting has dug itself quite a hole. High-grip tyres make the kart impenetrable for the average adult human without a fair amount of conditioning. There’s not much time to actually get a feel for a kart before it feels like your head is being torn off.

As I say, it makes you feel like you’re some hero for pushing through it, but it does mean you have a longer period of acclimatisation. In the end, I don’t see a huge benefit for the entry-level competitor. In karting, there isn’t really anywhere to hide from a performance perspective. The nature of the modern sport means that if you’re over a second off, you are basically dead last. The field spread isn’t what it used to be.

This isn’t like bikes, where being four seconds off the pace means you’re actually not half bad. In karting, just to have a weekend of a reasonable experience takes a lot of commitment.

Commitment itself isn’t bad, but the tyre insanity of club-level racing is a bit too far. Sure, there are tyres out there which are harder, and NKC mandate two sets per season for their championships, but even those tyres are very grippy, relatively speaking.

I do find it amusing when people talk about costs in motorsport and the ‘working-classes’ when the default position for most club karting in the UK is bare minimum a £200 set of tyres per weekend. Yet even the financial aspect is secondary to the physical one. If someone can push to that kind of expense, they will spend Monday, and maybe Tuesday, in pain.

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Karting is a funny old motorsport. There are essays and essays about inclusivity in motorsport and how bad it used to be, yet take one look at karting and you’ll see drivers like David Hockey who raced (and brazed) successfully with one arm back in the ‘60s. We have a female world champion and multiple top-level female drivers. We have had a deaf World Cup winner in Bas Lammers. It’s a cornucopia of ‘inclusivity’, yet this is rarely mentioned and promoted. This is partially because as soon as karting history is mentioned to anyone in motorsport, they recoil. It goes against many modern narratives. Any reply is, “Well, it’s not enough, is it?” and then something about F1.

Naturally, it’s much easier to write about how ‘bad’ something is or was rather than how good something actually is in many ways. I am as much a purveyor of negative bias as anyone, but when I look at karting history, it doesn’t really correlate 1:1 with the way a lot of essays portray it. I can’t go one week without an article on females in motorsport mentioning karting, yet failing to mention Susanna Raganelli. Or Michelle Mouton being the best female driver of all time and only FIA World Championship round winner, which just is not true. Things have got a little better, but not much.

But beyond all that, I think there’s something within the stat from New Zealand karting that is worth discussing. You will notice almost no effort to actually get women into motorsport to actually race. Actual adult women. Remember folks, motorsport is pay-to-play. It’s a hobby. It’s not a profession. Any promotion at the end of the day is about convincing people to spend money, and women aren’t really short of it. Women in their 20s out-earn men, so there’s no “muh gender pay gap” rhetoric to fall back on.

As I have mentioned a million times, the issue with motorsport participation - particularly anything associated with females - is that it’s framed around the ‘F1 pipeline’. Everything is about females in F1, and that is it. Well, you are creating a ceiling for yourself there, and it’s not like it’s generating huge numbers of girls coming in either. The problem with this approach is that success is basically measured by the pursuit of the ladder, not just ‘enjoying’ motorsport. And god forbid an adult decides they want to have a play at racing karts.

It really doesn’t surprise me that just 6% of senior kart drivers in New Zealand are female. It is a shame because, on average, based on my anecdotal experience, women tend to be more competent as drivers in karting. But any half decent female karter who is an adult will face a ton of questions about why they didn’t make it to cars. Men get this too, and that’s what we have seen a general adult exodus, but for women I think it’s probably worse such is the media spotlight and desperation to see a female back in an F1 car.

I am not one who believes in social engineering and assuming all differences between genders are social constructs, but it is odd that a sport which has had top adult female drivers has almost become more male over time, at least that’s what it feels like. I can recall more top adult female (and I mean TOP) drivers from karting’s history, but it’s not as easy in the modern context. We simply don’t see the likes of Raganelli, Pierson or Hellberg any more. I don’t quite follow as closely as I once did though.

As I say, when karting as an adult is framed as a failure, you’re really only left with a small market of very dedicated people who actually remain competing or enter the sport. Karting historically has had plenty of female drivers, and on average has had the highest proportion of all motorsports bar maybe drag racing, yet it hasn’t capitalised on this success at all.

The actual push to make people interested in motorsport into active participants is quite small generally. There’s a tremendous amount of passivity around this. I will often tell people, “Stop moaning and go buy a s/h kart.” I have plenty of issues with modern karting, but there are so many options. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything about targeting women into buying a kart. I do have little time for the excuses people come up with when prepositioned with the idea of just ‘getting a kart’ because I think the slew of negative articles has caused quite a bit of damage.

I am not arguing that karting should have x% of female competitors compared to men, but I think when we are looking at figures of 6% for adult competitors then we can probably start asking questions about how the sport, that has the likes of Raganelli, Pierson, and Hellberg in its history, is being marketed and what perceptions are being perpetuated into the mainstream consciousness.

So it comes as no surprise to me that they actually publish extremely detailed licence data, beyond anything seen elsewhere. Download it here.

Here’s a few takeaways:

There’s an interesting gender breakdown. The proportion of female competitors in the junior categories sits at 11%, but that proportion falls to just 6% in seniors. While data is absolutely scant in other territories, this does correlate with anecdotal observations that female competitors in karting beyond the age of 16 are exceedingly rare. Historically, karting is unique in that it has a female world champion as well as a whole host of other top female drivers; however, in more recent years, as karting has been framed as the ‘route to F1’ and any female driver who enters the sport will often get a spotlight, there’s more incentive to leave karting than stay. There’s also almost no effort made to advertise karting in any other meaningful way to adult female drivers, but the same could be said for males, however it seems an even less appealing option to spending women.

New Zealand was a rare example of witnessing a growth in competitors from 2020 onwards, but this can be partly explained by how some territories had a movement towards outdoor activities. There are complex variables that account for this, such as the literal land-to-space ratio per person, and that kind of thing, but an interesting trend nonetheless.

New Zealand, especially compared to the UK, compares favourably in terms of the ratio of kart licences vs. the population. It should be said KartSport New Zealand do publish all licence data, but for comparison’s sake I’ll focus on competition licences, of which they had 1,111 in 2026. That means New Zealand has approximately 4.24x more licences per head, though if we add all competitors (IKR etc…) in the UK, it might be nearer to 3x. That is still a large difference between the regions.

In terms of junior vs. senior, New Zealand karting is approximately 65% Senior. In the UK the figure - and this is an estimation - is nearer 30%, now maybe lower. This is another marked difference. The large proportion of adult drivers potentially means their proportion of karters per population is far healthier in NZ than in other territories.

Overall regardless of results this is truly gold-standard transparency. However it is no surprise that, with a population of only just over 5,000,000, New Zealand demonstrates a relatively healthy karting scene.

Take, for example, YouTube’s new update, which now renders a frame viewed as a ‘view’. YouTube used to be a more discerning platform and would only count a ‘view’ after 30 seconds of a long-form video, but in the era of short-form video, where platforms like TikTok count almost anything as a view, YouTube had to react, and this change will affect all videos - long and short.

The clever thing about TikTok is, I suspect, that they realised what they are selling isn’t videos to viewers. It’s the ‘good’ feelings someone gets when one of their videos gets a few hundred or a few thousand views. This is about ‘creators’ and keeping them motivated to keep posting as much as pleasing the audience.

I know YouTube fairly well, and when you put work into a video and it barely scrapes a few hundred views, you need to be quite tough psychologically to deal with it. YouTube needs to keep creators on the platform, and when ad revenue is a bit scant, at least having a few thousand views on a video rather than a few dozen will make creators feel a little better, even if nothing has actually changed in terms of actual viewers.

That’s not to say that viewers don’t like to see social proof. The more views on a video, the more likely they are to click. It does, however, make redundant my, albeit crude, analysis of Formula 1 highlights on YouTube, which had shown signs of plateauing, if not outright decline.

This is really to describe how complex viewership is. Recently, F1 viewership in America has been reported as being down, although USA Today did correct their story to add a bit more context. The long and short of it is that there are fewer actual eyeballs on Formula 1, but those who are watching are watching for a lot longer.

The reason I make these points is that I write as an individual, and not as someone who is necessarily reflective of any wider trends. I have followed F1 my entire life. As I describe in Motorsport Sagas: Unlocking the Power of Storytelling in Racing, series like Formula 1 contain most of the ingredients that make a compelling motorsport. It doesn’t need 100 overtakes a race to be compelling. It’s high-stakes. High-stakes racing beats ‘close racing’ every day of the week.

It’s not that I enjoy following F1. It’s a habitual behaviour. It’s hard NOT to know what’s going on. You can’t be involved in motorsport and not know about the current goings-on in Formula 1. As much as I despise so much of it, I do find myself watching F1 content.

Except now, something is amiss.

For all my anti-Formula 1 comments about its influence on the wider motorsport scene, I have rarely felt ‘apathetic’ towards F1. I always felt ‘something’ - bad or good. I still like the old cars, the old races. I still had that feeling of, “I wonder what happened in F1?” That has almost completely vanished this year.

The awful power unit regulations are partly to blame, and I don’t need to go into detail, but there’s something else. It just doesn’t really matter who wins. There’s such homogeneity infesting itself into the core of the sport that it’s losing a feeling of high-stakes.

If this kind of feeling spreads throughout the fanbase, it’s game over. It feels cheap. It feels a bit throwaway. I am still a ‘viewer’ somewhere in the data, whether it be highlights on YouTube, or commenting on RaceFans every now and again, which I can’t help but do. But am I an ‘engaged’ viewer? I am feeling very much less so.

It could be that I am getting older and every season feels less novel, less fresh, and my apathy does seem to be spread across a lot of motorsport categories. I do think this is a motorsport-wide phenomenon. Lots of other motorsport have similar issues.

However, I do find myself watching chess, and that seems oddly enthralling. And that’s about as ‘solved’ and ‘dull’ as a sport can get. However, and this is partly due to the otherworldliness of the top players and vast numbers of players, it feels ‘high-stakes’. So I know this isn’t just a ‘me’ thing being a bit downbeat about the world.

Obviously, when you’re historically minded, you feel deeply how far F1 has fallen. It’s quite astonishing. I do see people saying old races are boring, but they often forget that we are viewing them in retrospect. If you have an idea of which cars were fast and who won what race and championship, then there are no stakes involved in watching old races.

But when you engage with them as a kind of film-watching experience, and allow yourself to lose yourself in it, everything is better. The cars, the drivers, and not least the commentary.

The duo of Hunt and Walker should be studied. One mic, so no rent-a-car chummy belly-laugh banter. Walker, who was an ad expert, knew how to use dynamic range at his peak. He didn’t just ‘shout’, like people lead you to believe. He was soft when he needed to be.

And Hunt, well, Hunt was Hunt. Authority and charisma, and an old English twang.

Each race had its own identity, too. Not every track with the same adverts... everything now is just so bland, boring... grey. If you’re into colour grading and film, it really does feel like going from film to (bad) digital. it’s like going from Paris, Texas (OK I only watched recently, but goddamn it looks good) to, well, most movies nowadays - grey, flat and lifeless. Videographers will know what I am on about. There’s a richness to film that even the best colour graders and editors can’t attain, Arri or no Arri. This is a good analogy, I stanmd by it.

I haven’t quite escaped F1’s grasp totally, but I am past the caring stage. Red Bull, McLaren, even Ferrari... it’s all much of a muchness.

I think Max is the finest driver that has ever existed, and to some extent, when you have published proclamations as such, you do enjoy a feeling when watching the racing that your reputation, however small, is on the line. But even then, Max, Lewis, Lando... who cares? The drivers don’t even look that bothered either. Again, much of a muchness.

If I think long and hard enough I can probably sus out the conflation of factors that have led me to the point where, to me, Formula 1 just feels low-stakes. I think it started properly with Sprint Races to be honest, maybe the budget cap too. That was the beginning of the great ‘cheapening’. But I am not sure I care enough to go into too much detail. They aren’t losing a ‘fan’ here, I never was a fan, Formula 1 was just part of the motorsport culture a lot of us find ourselves being involved in. For me fans come and fans go, but it’s the disintegration of a core feeling of stakes which sports like Formula 1 can’t ever afford to lose.

I absolutely do want to be more positive here. I think there are aspects to motorsport right now which are truly special, though naturally some of it is esoteric and strange. I would much rather be writing about them than this. However, I feel I need to be open with all my subscribers as I try and figure this one out. I am trying to dig for something that’ll inspire you and make you feel good, but also maybe you recognise you own feelings in my little vent here.

Motorsport UK does make a lot of fanfare about RS Clubman and KX licences, which are free, but it’s very difficult to make any assessment of these because we don’t know the full conditions of how they were obtained and how drivers actually use them. Plus they’re free, so their actual value is debatable in the wider motorsport context. An extra 20-30k licences looks great on press releaset, but they mean very little without wider context. TeamSport Karting, for example, boasts over 1,000,000 customers per year. So a few of them signing up to free licences isn’t really a big deal worth writing about.

Also, in the UK, Motorsport UK is not the be-all and end-all. We have other permitting authorities (Nora92, IOPD, etc.) who cover four-wheel racing events, and this intersects with IKR (Independent Kart Racing). So it’s hard to know exactly the current landscape, and it may always will be that way.

Either way, the core licence figure gives at least some real, tangible trend. It’s clear motorsport in the UK hasn’t recovered from Covid. However, the current number is actually in line with roughly where you’d expect following the pre-Covid trend, which was down. Licences aren’t the be-all and end-all though, as they don’t measure how many times someone actually competes. Often people renew licences for a whole array of reasons: “What ifs,” “It’s nice to keep just in case,” and “I ain’t doing another ARKS test.”

It does, however, paint a picture of a sport in a stagnant place, if not in a continued slow decline. Recently we’ve seen the announcement that Lakeside Karting will be closing, Birmingham Wheels is long gone as is WildTrax, and Clay Pigeon looks to be in serious trouble if the development there actually goes ahead. Sutton, too, is in trouble. One might think that because F1 had a big boom, motorsport would grow massively. It hasn’t. This is the apex fallacy: you look at the top and think it’s symptomatic of a wider picture. It isn’t.

The issue is this: if motorsport is framed by F1, there’s very little incentive to become involved in it. F1 has maybe one or two new spots open for drivers every year, so the only market you’re really going to attract is extremely wealthy parents or extremely naive ones - of which there are plenty. Elsewhere, you’re basically relying on cultural reminiscence of the past. The historic grids, the weird random multi-class car grids. All that kind of stuff exists in the ether of motorsport. It’s kind of stable, but it’s also very difficult to know where half these grids actually get new drivers from. It won’t get easier when the road market of cars becomes less transferable to a race track, as appears to be the case.

Really, I suspect the sport just relies on repeated custom. People who race year in and year out, come rain or shine. But if the numbers overall are declining and you aren’t bringing in new people, that spells trouble long term, even if the balance sheet shows increasing revenue.

Karting seems to have bottomed out, but when you measure that against the kind of marketing blitz there’s been, one would struggle to call it a resounding success. I’ve long spoken about how marketing karting based on Formula 1 is not just disrespectful - when you’re marketing something against something you have zero control over and what is pretty much an impossible dream, you’re baking in a number of problems, particularly inflationary pressure and encouraging an adult exodus. There’s often a mistaken belief that rental karting is a feeder to owner-driver racing. I posit it’s the complete opposite, given the insanely low conversion rates, and it’s actually taking drivers from owner-driver when all is said and done.

But I want to talk about a wider cultural malaise. Karting has its problems, and the vehicles themselves are paradoxically becoming less favourable for owners despite claims of being more ‘user-friendly’ (they are considerable worse in my view on almost all counts). We also have an ageing volunteer base, especially with club committees. These clubs are really the backbone of the sport’s current structure, and this system of clubs worked in the early stages of the development of motorsport, but now seems somewhat archaic and inflexible. But this inflexibility is partly a result of being constantly in survival mode. It’s hard to be dynamic when you’re having to book tracks and worry about covering costs.

Motorsport is so insanely diverse it’s almost impossible to diagnose any kind of overall condition. What has karting got to do with rally? Not much. We’re very much in vibes territory. Rallying feels like it means less than it used to. Car racing kind of feels a bit old and haggard now, for the most part. Young people haven’t got as much money as they once did, nor space or possibility to transport race vehicles. No one wants to mechanic anymore, apparently. Motorsport in general in the UK isn’t as much part of the nation’s psyche as it once was. Throw a dart at a random board, and any number you hit can be associated with a valid problem.

However, it is my belief that motorsport, in general, is so infatuated with Formula 1 it’s cornered itself. No one seems to ask what value there is in racing. Formula 1 isn’t motorsport, really. It transcended that tag a long time ago, but its effect, in my view, can be problematic.

Racing as a cultural expression is perfect. Racing as a professional pursuit is basically insane. Music suffers from a similar problem now. With social media pushing a lot of “music industry is awful” posts, it’s perpetuating the emotion that doing music isn’t worth it. Well, throughout history 99.99% of musicians never “made it.” The purpose of music isn’t a record contract. This is how motorsport has functioned in the past, and it did it well. It’s not a professional pursuit. It’s a cultural one, but we’ve forgotten what that even means. We know it when we see it, of course, but it’s hard to put into words.

Now, a lot of people will say “The governing bodies need to…” and like with any kind of big government stooge, they’d be foolish to suggest the central body can have a positive marketing impact. In my view, governing bodies are generally best when they stay very quiet and, instead of trying to be the drivers of interest, they instead create an environment - basically get out of the way - for creative people who develop culture. Governing bodies should be relatively small but effective. You write rules, you enforce rules, stay out of politics as much as possible and you let the fun people do fun people stuff.

However, with the grand retreat of motorsport media - certainly the tangible aspects of it - there are very few people left insane enough to take up this role. The issue with social media is it encourages individual-led content rather than generic-led, and especially so in niche corners. Users generally follow personalities rather than generic brands.

In some ways this is good; in others it’s bad. Superkarts can generate a LOT of views if someone like Jarno Opmeer races at Assen, but not one person is commenting on who won the race, and I suspect the conversion rate from view to actually becoming a competitor is basically zero.

But governing bodies tend to buy into the Formula 1 narrative. The value is “producing an F1 driver” through some mythical ladder or system. It’s not about making sure cultures thrive and wider participation becomes the norm. I am a “karting expert,” and we can see quite evidently how karting history is absolutely swamped with F1 discussion and almost none on its own unique aspects and dedicated competitors. This hasn’t helped karting at all. It is now culturally redundant.

Cost is often the central theme, but cost is really just a matter of expectation. Obviously hurdles get put in the way of new competitors - licences, tests, etc. - that really do way more damage than people realise. But when culture is stripped from motorsport and replaced by the pursuit of a professional drive, then anything outside of finishing in the top five becomes failure. Imagine guitar sales if success were only measured by whether you got more than 10 listeners on Spotify. Basically - and I think the stats will back this up - they would drop 99% overnight.

This is really the heart of the problem. Remove F1 from all motorsport marketing material and people will be forced to ask the right question about marketing, about incentives, about motivations.

But put Formula 1 front and center, don’t expect anything other than stagnation or decline.

Now of course, there are places in this world where safetyism and that cultural creep of kafkaism has yet become an infection, casting a dark cloud of malaise upon us all. Unfortunately, risk aversion is embedded in humans. People are far more fearful of something going wrong and being blamed than they are about getting something right that’s good. We have an inbuilt cultural decline mechanism within us that used to be somewhat tempered by the fact a tribesperson could once just go on a wander and not be surveilled by 8,000 CCTV cameras. Downside: they may be eaten by a sabertooth tiger, but at least it was freedom and liberty. There’s a reason why there’s horrific levels of anti-Traveller sentiment, it isn’t really ‘hate’ as much as it’s envy.

However, I’m often amazed at the kind of stuff I trip across. Recently, I’ve been watching Supermoto racing on the streets of Colombian towns that looks utterly insane. Part of me wonders if you need a certain level of flexibility within a society, shall we say, for stuff like this to happen. Sure, the British Isles has the Isle of Man TT, but in reality we all know that’s a freak anomaly, a consequence of it not being possible on mainland Britain. It should be protected at all costs.

So, what event am I talking about that has led me to opine about the decline of society? The 1969 Transatlantic Air Race. A race from BT tower in London to New York and Back. Air races until this point weren’t a new concept. They’d become quite common and attracted a large amount of media attention, given that air travel was essentially a new concept. This one in particular caught my eye because I came across a two-seater kart-type vehicle called the Super Twinster. It had a number plate, so I assumed it must have been road-registered. Apparently it ended up at Tilbury in one of the buildings, but I don’t know what was left of it.

However, in the marketing material, it had been “seen in the Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race.” My ears perked up immediately. I’d never heard of this. I now know I should have given there’s a display at Brooklands with one of the Harriers that took part. This is not an obscure event. Presumably the Super Twinster kart was used to ferry one of the over 300 competitors from BT Tower to wherever they were flying from, or at least somewhere along the road route. I’ve yet to figure out who used it

There’s no real need for me to over-describe the event because the videos from the time do that. Seeing a Harrier fly from near St Pancras Train Station is utterly bonkers if you try to view it through a contemporary lens. Utterly unthinkable. In addition, there’s a clip where a competitor is landing in a plane only for a tyre to blow out. In effect, this is an airplane crash, potentially a major crash, narrowly avoided. However, rather than everyone panicking, the competitors jumped out and hopped on a landing helicopter or... watch the video if you don’t believe me.

Truimph also had a presence. They had bikes set at each set of traffic lights, so if it was red, the competitor could run hop onto another bike further along.

I can’t begin to imagine the kind of risk assessment, permitting, and insurance you’d require nowadays to organise a race down BT Tower in London, let alone a race across the Atlantic involving brand new military aircraft like the Harrier. You can’t even hold a car race without art galleries worrying about vibrations nowadays.

This isn’t old guy shouting at clouds. This is a demonstrative example of the death of freedom and liberty. There are plenty of people who’d jump at the chance of doing this today, anything close to this. Sure, we have these micro-cultures where mad stuff still slips through the net, but nothing on this kind of grand scale.

I mourn it desperately.

At best, we might see 30 new drivers enter Formula 1 over the next ten years, and that’s generous. The current ten-year average hovers around that at 2.9 per year. These are extraordinarily small numbers. Some years drivers might get one opening. So when we talk about “opportunity,” we’re actually talking about something borderline impossible. And even when drivers reach F1, they don’t suddenly become millionaires and offset years of spending on racing. This isn’t a problem for F1 though.

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For sport to be economically successful, it needs stability. F1 is a weird hybrid of team and individual. Some teams build genuinely large faithful fanbases (i.e Ferrari) while others struggle. This is because brands, manufacturers, and personal endeavours make up the team structure (though the latter seems obsolete now) and it’s hard to be ‘faithful’ to these concepts as they fluctuate and change. Sure you can trace back the DNA of a team like Alpine to Toleman, but it’s not like football where people have either geographical connections or at least some feeling of permanence with their chosen childhood team. There is a weird alchemy at play which renders the ‘team’ and ‘development’ aspect vital to F1’s success, but it’s drivers that gives fans something to hold their hat onto. There’s no incentive for F1 to have a high driver turnover.

No fan wants to constantly recycle their interest every year or two. If you want costs for F1 aspirants drivers to be anywhere near close to being reasonable, F1 needs an extremely high driver turnover to radically increase supply (as well as scrap Super Licence points). That’s not really a desirable proposition for F1 however. It’s also systemically impossible. You’d need, I speculate, to expand the number of teams maybe to 30 and above to see any downward pressure on finance for a driver to get to F1 and that’s not possible.

So with the current system of 11 teams it is simply not worthwhile from a sporting perspective to increase driver turnover (unless you run a B team to test drivers) nor is it commercially a good thing because drivers build value for teams over years.

On the wider effect on racing of this dominant discourse the issue is motorsport is an odd term that bundles disparate forms of racing. It’s like calling everything “ball sports.” Except individual ball sports generally have independent governance. Motorsport categories tend to (though not absolutely) congregate under one banner - usually the FIA and the various associated ASNs. Rallying and karting, for example, have nothing to do with each other, yet they sit under the same governance umbrella.

Each category’s problems are specific. Karting issues aren’t rallying issues; drag racing sits elsewhere entirely. Yes, cost gripes are universal, but each is its own ecosystem. Yet F1 gets the majority of airtime. Obviously, drivers drop out of that system. Over the next ten years, you have thousands of drivers competing for 30 spaces. Limited seats in F3 and F2. And with Antonelli on course to win the F1 World Championship before he’s 20, the expectation is clear: if you’re not winning by 18 or 19, you’re done unless you can seek asylum in Formula E and elsewhere.

Motorsport works best when each category stands alone and offers its own structures and incentives. That allowed for true prosperity, yet I don’t see it. Karting has been culturally annexed by Formula 1, but I watch how Motorsport UK core licences haven’t really recovered from pre-2020, and I’m asking: what’s next?

The airtime given to drivers unable to fund their careers presents a culture of inaccessibility. That’s the inherent problem I want to highlight. When all eyes are on F1, you invite criticism without a solution. We create a culture of unmarketability because success is rendered down to whether it produces F1 drivers. Motorsport culture can be vibrant and exciting, but currently that isn’t what dominates the zeitgeist.

This is why we see these “arrive and drive” karting series often labelled as fixing the problem by naïve journalists, which obviously don’t. There’s only ever one winner. When the sole purpose is to “find talent”, they offer nothing for general competitors. If you’re finishing outside the top ten in these series and you haven’t got millions waiting, I ask: what are you there for other than making top drivers look good? So there’s always an inherent ceiling with the value in these projects, and I would posit they’re not particularly great value for money either.

Now, reading this article, proofing as I am, I see that I’m meandering about, struggling to find a core and clear point, and that’s reflective of the problem at large. I probably have written this article, or at least made this point on Substack, dozens of times. I just hope of reaching a new audience each time. We see endless posts highlighting ‘problems’ that offer absolutely zero solutions and just bemoan the situation. There is no fix here. I can’t be clearer. The numbers speak for themselves.

If you want F1 to be the ‘be-all-and-end-all’, then you have to accept drivers will drop out, very talented ones too. If F1 has just three new seats per year, at best, then costs in the ‘ladder’ system will be biblically large. There is no escaping this. The fact you need 40 Super Licence points, which come from actively competing in competitive cars, only exacerbates the problem.

Let’s get real for a moment. Take travel costs alone; with a championship like F2, they will be beyond the reach of almost everyone. You’ll need to spend £10,000 on plane tickets if you budget very well. How many of us have £10k to spend on anything, let alone that very basic minimum for a driver to even get from airport to airport for a season in F2?

Just think about that for a moment. Travel costs, just the travel, not even food or getting to and from an airport, run into numbers beyond most reasonably earning people. So when we add all the actual costs of racing, how many people on this planet have that kind of money to sink and gamble on a prospect? We’re talking about a few dozen companies and individuals with the kind of interest to do so.

At the heart of what is going on is that, as F1 dominates the discourse ever more, we have allowed a situation where all the arteries and rivers that make up motorsport culture have run dry.

My solution is somewhat abstract. If each form of motorsport was more individual, with its own identity and structure, opportunities could arise within them. Karting is the main victim because it’s largely been de-professionalised, but elsewhere I see motorsport becoming increasingly isolated as a concept. The core licences are well below pre-2020 levels, and the current stagnation hides the fact that motorsport, and by this I don’t mean the free licences that make up the bulk of ‘overall’ participants, but the actual, proper, full-on motorsport competitors, isn’t showing signs of growth.

I know this may sound downbeat, but I am not. There is opportunity in motorsport but we can’t keep talking about drivers on the ‘F1 ladder’ losing out. This is unfixable.

Recently, I went on a super-deep dive to find information and pictures from the 1965 European Karting Championship round at Vevey. Partly because I was researching Susanna Raganelli (‘66 World Karting Champion), but also to confirm the copy written by Karting Magazine about how the Italian fans lifted the team aloft after their win.

I managed to come across some pictures, which were great. I knew video existed, but alas, I never came across it... until now.

Thankfully, the Swiss archive has uploaded footage from the race, taken from a newsreel, which were popular back then.

The images are quite something.

Watch here

A nice little Brucey Bonus is Raganneli’s win a the opening round of 1967’s World Karitng Championship at Vevey as well here.

Read more

I write a lot about karting from a historical context because I do think it re-contextualises the sport and also gives some reverence to those who raced in the past and have now been long forgotten. People spent so much of their life trying to attain these plaudits and championships in period, and raced in amazing locations with events that took incredible bravery to put on - and they have largely been forgotten. This is a cultural crime which I hope I have at least corrected in some small way.

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The usual caveats apply. YouTube is a platform in flux, and year-on-year comparisons are always fraught with complications. Various broadcast deals around the world affect how many viewers access highlights, and views continue to accrue throughout the calendar year.

Yet in such a growth-obsessed business, we may be witnessing a genuine plateau on YouTube. While the 2025 season opener hit 15m views against 2026’s 12m, this year’s view counts held relatively steady until the recent, more pronounced drop-off. That’s a signal worth noting.

The new power unit regulations, frankly, have been abhorrent. Drivers routinely stumble through interviews barely understanding why their units are deploying in the manner they do. This is the nature of the new 50/50 power split, where battery deployment is managed by some mysterious AI algorithmic model.

We can only speculate why the view count has dropped off as the season has gone on, and yes, caveats as described apply. Either way… this isn’t good news for F1.

Data used:

2025 2026

1 15,470,659 12,041,960

2 9,051,616 9,514,923

3 7,303,541 9,298,683

4 7,314,687 7,923,836

5 7,796,590 7,503,858

6 7,116,282 7,941,427

7 7,812,351 7,730,496

8 9,575,840 5,644,690

9 7,020,478 5,503,107

10 7,129,849 4,679,319

Yet we’re drowning in poorly researched media handwringing about karting’s cost. The articles rely entirely on anecdotes from wealthy parents boasting about spending, not on verifiable performance data. And that’s the problem: there is no real data, just performative flex. You’ll never hear, for example, about how Luke Browning didn’t do any of the big FIA race series - he actually barely did much more than club karting. No one is spending 250k a year racing at Hooton Park IKR.

Here’s what you need to understand. F1 operates an almost zero supply market. It admits one or two drivers per year - full stop. It’s inevitable given the long careers of drivers now, with the additional factor that we barely get any new teams or expansion of the grid. But the fact that it has the audacity to shame karting for being expensive is shameful. When supply is restricted to near-zero and demand is high, what did anyone expect to happen to the so-called “first step to F1”? ‘Let’s associate FIA Karting with F1 and then give a ton of wealthy people a reason to turn it into a Veblen Good and conspicuously spend.’ Great job.

The math kills the narrative that things are just oddly expensive - they can’t not be. British F4 had 13 rookies in 2026. Scale that across the roughly 14 global F4 championships and you’re looking at approximately 250 new F4 drivers annually - a vanishingly small number. If you work backwards: F4 needs ~250 drivers to sustain itself per year. If karting’s sole purpose is feeding F4, and we assume the top 10% warrants progression, you’re talking about 2,500 drivers total in the karting pipeline aged around 14.

The FIA’s “arrive and drive” initiatives add perhaps 100 drivers to the mix - window dressing. They burn out quickly because the system offers no genuine incentive beyond that narrow elite corridor. Once you’re outside the top 10%, karting becomes pointless. As karting is largely subjugated in service of F1, it loses its culture, its language, its identity, its reason to exist beyond serving F1’s talent filter.

Where costs do embed themselves is F4 and beyond. You can’t get to F1 and not really interact with these classes now given the way the Super Licence structure works. There’s the real fiscal dysfunction. Even if the numbers are absurdly small. You need roughly 14 F4 grids globally. That’s it. The pyramid is not designed to accommodate scale. You can’t moan about high-costs when everything is structured for high costs, and that starts right at the fact F1 has only one or two new drivers per year. Karting can fix itself by kicking out F1 and completely removing its tentacles from the paddock and dissociating, but for F4 and beyond it isn’t possible.

The conversation about “pathway costs” is fundamentally broken because it treats a structural impossibility as a problem to solve. It’s not. It’s inherent.

These pictures are almost too good to be true. They come from the Swiss ETH Library Zurich archives and are from Wohlen in 1963

Here are some amazing pictures from Kędzierzyn-Koźle, Poland, during the 1970s. The circuit was located in the middle of the town and was later turned into a supermarket. The pictures - especially of the spectators - are incredible.

Some amazing videos from archives:

Geneva, Place des Vernets, International Karting Grand Prix 1964 - https://www.rts.ch/archives/1964/video/a-fond-le-kart-26954262.html

Geneva, Place des Vernets, International Karting Grand Prix 1964 - https://www.rts.ch/archives/1964/video/karts-en-course-26181631.html

Unknown Race https://www.rts.ch/archives/1967/video/carrefour-09-05-67-26183986.html

Cadet GX200, MicroMax, and Water Swift R all saw relatively encouraging year-on-year gains. Senior Max posted a small improvement but remains 15 entries down on 2024’s 60.

It’s worth noting these figures don’t represent overall championship registrations - we don’t yet have that data, as unlike previous years the championship made no public announcement about them. It’s far from catastrophic for Motorsport UK, but it does seem to represent a consistent and sustained stagnation in the karting market.

Opinion: Association with SkyF1 might not be the saving grace

Motorsport UK have made much fanfare about a deal to show highlights on SkyF1, and there was some disappointment it wasn’t announced earlier from the few comments posted on social media. Whether this deal generates better entries for next year, we’ll have to wait and see. The concern will be whether associating with SkyF1 will just put continued inflationary pressure on championship.

There’s little evidence to back up association with F1 has been a net positive for karting since it became somewhat entrenched culturally in the 1990s. It would appear there is a figurative growth ceiling in place as a consequence, aside from driving adults out of the sport on mass.

I have posted elsewhere this that explains the issue.

The so-called ‘Global Pathway to F1’

To comfortably supply Formula 4 with new drivers - and that’s accounting for plenty doing two years - you’re only really feeding in about 250 new drivers a year, not the full 500 who race globally now.

So if you assume roughly a 1 in 10 conversion rate, you’re looking at something like 1,500 to 2,500* serious 14-year-old karters globally (I am being generous here I think) if it’s this mythical pathway.

F1 doesn’t need a popular karting. It just needs a few thousand globally racing aged 14 and 15.... and it doesn’t have any need for drivers in karts over the age of 16.

So if you’re banking a growth strategy for karting on the Global Pathway to F1... good luck with that.

With this in mind, karting becomes a hard sell for anyone not in the top 15 of a particular class because if all roads lead to F1, you’ll find there’s a lot of slip roads off.

Alan Dove

There’s a persistent chip on the shoulder in motorsport about the word “athlete.” Whenever it gets mentions fans worldwide get defensive. So recently, Stephen A. Smith addressed a NASCAR fan caller on Sirius XM, while debating greatest athletes of all time, with characteristic bluntness: “I’m being honest. It’s a great sport. But come on, bro. Getting behind the wheel of a car is not the same. You can be behind the wheel of a car in your 60s and 70s, for crying out loud.” He threw golf in for good measure: “Just because you gotta walk the course for 18 holes for four days, that don’t make you an athlete.”

I don’t have a problem with this line of thinking. Neither should you. It actually elevates racing drivers, because - as Kenny Powers understood - who wants to be crowned the greatest exerciser?

Can racing drivers be athletic? Sure. Are they great athletes? That’s a different question entirely. Are we suggesting Max Verstappen is the greatest driver in the world because he is a supreme athletic specimen? Or is it something else - a skillset, a mindset, a level of human processing that almost nobody else on the planet can match? The latter. Obviously.

Yes, social media has been awash with motorsport fans insisting that racing drivers are athletes. I get the impulse - I’m not immune to it. The moment someone mentions karting in the context of F1 and I sense dismissal, I stiffen, then go on the rampage. I am not free from this particular strain of dorkery. But the reaction to Smith’s comments reflects something worth examining: a weakness in motorsport fandom - anxiety dressed up as defense.

Does anyone actually watch Formula 1 and think, wow, isn’t it remarkable that this driver has trained so hard he can sustain some G-loading through a corner? No. You’re watching in awe at the bravery and the precision. If Magnus Carlsen turned up to a chess match absolutely jacked, it wouldn’t make chess a physical sport. It would just mean Magnus had been to the gym.

Drivers can be athletic. But to insist they are athletes, in fact ‘great athletes’ - I find myself largely agreeing with Smith’s gatekeeping. Yes racing is far more physical than most outsiders appreciate, and frankly I have no idea how Davide Fore is still racing KZ at his age - it’s remarkable. But I admire him for his ability to drive and win championships, not for his mileage on a push bike.

I wrote recently about why I think drivers are, in a certain sense, weak. The defensive reaction to Smith’s comments reinforces that point. Fans scramble to justify what they watch, and when someone challenges it, the reflex is: no, no, my favourite driver IS an athlete.

The better answer - the correct answer - is: you’re right, they’re not athletes. They’re something better.

Alan Dove

Cover pic By Moody College of Communication - https://www.flickr.com/photos/utcomm/52753326237/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=168131452

This was brought on by a piece published by Donald McRae of The Guardian - a paper I don’t have much time for, but alas it’s still worthy of comment - with Lando Norris. It begins with the usual light-weight fluff these articles carry, but soon takes a turn when Donald starts pressing on regulations. He had already been handed a message outlining what he couldn’t ask about - Max, George, and the new regs. I want to interject here: if I ever received such a message, I’d tell them to stuff it. Donald pressed ahead anyway, asking about regulations. Lando’s manager, not present in person but listening by phone stating there can be no questions about this subject. Donald asked again. A person in the room approach with “We’re done with time.” Donald requested ten more minutes. Norris replied: “I am not the boss.” The rest of The Guardian piece is almost irrelevant at that point because that is the key phrase.

Now, like all these things, there are two sides. One can’t help but suspect Norris was being flippant. But the reality is he should be the boss. He’s the World Champion.

What does it mean to be World Champion if you aren’t the boss?

Some have drawn comparisons between this incident and Max versus Giles Richards. Journalists may see things differently from the inside - fair enough - but from an integrity standpoint, there is a crucial distinction. When Max acted as he did, like it or not, he was very much operating as his own boss. You may not like the manner, but there is a sense of personal integrity in it that you expect from top-flight drivers. They are supposed to be like that.

For all we know, Norris’s management may be acting on his own direction. But then one has to ask: why does he need them there at all? It’s embarrassing.

I have noticed this weakness spreading throughout racing at every level. Karters are absolutely terrified to puff their chests out and take pride in their achievements. Instead, they seem almost ashamed to be in karts, hiding from the world and hoping nobody notices. An odd paradox of racing to win and hoping no one notices.

F1, of course, has degraded massively in recent decades. The current engine regulations are the most egregious and offensive technical framework to have graced the motorsport since KF - but the rot is in the drivers too. There are precious few competitors, in any discipline, who still carry the level of personal integrity that is supposed to come with being a racing driver.

You don’t put your life on the line to say the words “I’m not the boss” … ever!

Someone mentioned their interest in USSR motorsport to me, so I went back to the USSR Karting Group that I’ve been following for a while and did some digging. Much to my delight - and this absolutely would have made my book had I known about it prior - the fact that a kart race was actually part of the USSR’s Summer Games of the People (Spartakiads) came to light.

As well as acting as a selection process for the Olympics, it also included technical competitions, hence the karting. A lovely piece of motorsport history.

I can’t say for sure what year these photos were taken, but Karting Magazine reported on this in 1974. The races were held at the Luzhniki Druzhba Arena and Stadium.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to be uncovered from these events.

Early German Karting Clips

OureFilms is on a bit of a roll at the moment, though one can’t help but wonder how long he can keep posting archive videos.

My favourite recently is a clip of a street karting race. Thanks to Redditors, we now know the location of the race is Kaltenkirchen. It was known as the Kaltenkirchen 9th International Kart Race.

I’ve matched up some of the stills from the video to what it looks like today.

The circuit was relatively simple, but seemed to accommodate a fair number of spectators - including a woman pushing her baby in a pram next to the track. That’s sketchy even for me!

The onboard footage shows a Class 2 kart as well, which was twin 100cc. The overall quality is fantastic. The source of the video is here: https://digitaler-lesesaal.bundesarchiv.de/video/31687/691473

Here’s a few more utter brilliant videos front he early days of German karting:

Quincy UFOs and the Good Ol’ Days

In Karting Sagas I make a fun little connection between famous UFO sightings and venues of kart races. In the USA, Bottomless Lakes at Roswell and the Buffalo Lakes at Lubbock have their own famous UFO stories, as do Lakenheath and Rissington in the UK. However, what I didn’t know was that Quincy - where the utterly bonkers but brilliant Quincy GP takes place - is also very important in UFO lore. It’s where MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) was founded. Apparently, it’s a bit of a UFO hotspot.

The reason Quincy came back onto my radar is that they’ve published some incredible images recently. Just golden stuff.

WKA Poster

The World Karting Association just casually posted this on their social media. Daytona Kart Week, as it’s now known, is one of those events that makes you wonder why it isn’t a huge worldwide spectacle. You have superkarts and laydowns on the long circuit, an infield kart track for sprints, and then dirt ovals - all happening at the same time. It’s a true festival of karts.

This image shows a field of superkarts, and what appears to also be Martin Hines - just casually boasting 944 entries back in the day.

Alan Dove

We obviously have plenty of pictures, and we know (because of archived TV listings) that footage existed somewhere - but now we’ve actually got some to actually watch. The reason is that the archive the YouTube film was taken from happened to contain a ton more karting videos. The only one that’s actually been uploaded just happens to be this gold. Watch here (5:33 onwards) https://digitaler-lesesaal.bundesarchiv.de/video/34453/693230

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It’s from the 1966 European Championship at Vevey, where Susy was victorious. Big crowd too. The images are fantastic.

Read more on the Susanna Raganelli Saga

Obviously, DRS was rubbish. The V6 hybrids are rubbish too. I am not saying how good it was last year, it was never ‘good’. But I think we’ve now reached a point where F1 cars are contemptuous to the viewer - to the racing fan. They are an affront to the very concept of being a racing driver.

Naturally, people will say, “Oh, but there’s always been management in F1.” Of course there has - but there are thresholds and spectrums. Saving your tyres over a stint is not the same as a car literally decelerating halfway down a straight, followed by driving like a grandma on her way to get her hair done around a particular corner. I don’t even want to go into detail about the nature of these new 50/50 hybrids - such is my disdain for them.

Of course, F1 will always attract inherent interest because it’s the top dog. There’s a huge amount of cultural and emotional investment in it, thus people find it incredibly difficult to divorce themselves from it. Such is that strength that even the most appalling set of technical regulations ever conceived (post-KF) will still create a sense of stakes. But these new regulations have broken a kind of contract - what we expect from elite driving performance. No one wants to be the most efficient driver on earth. I saw a few LinkedIn posts claiming F1 is “better now” because it relates to road driving. I nearly blew my top reading that.

Unfortunately, because F1 has grown so strong in recent years, almost the entire motorsport industry is reliant on it in some way or another - karting especially. It can’t fail, because too many dominoes fall with it. I find it incredible that we have kids racing this very weekend, trying to drive flat-out in the hope of reaching a sport that doesn’t even reward that anymore. Why any parent - billionaire or not - would stomach spending the kind of money required to reach F1 is beyond me now.

I have, of course, lambasted F1’s influence on karting, which I consider wholly destructive. But that is as much karting’s fault as anything else. Still, in isolation, I can mourn the death of a core value of F1 driving.

To see what we’re seeing in Suzuka qualifying - and I say “seeing,” because I could only stomach a minute or two of highlights - is what I deem a desecration of a holy site. Of course, as I write this on a Saturday afternoon, Sunday will probably deliver a chaotic Grand Prix, and the hard-core followers of F1, along with fans of whoever is winning, will call it great racing. But it isn’t. It’s terrible racing. F1 will still come out on top, and we’ll have that familiar, confusing moment where viewing figures aren’t as bad as you’d expect.

Sure, I have other interests in motorsport. But for most F1 fans, there’s nowhere else to go. They’re stuck with it - forced to endure it. And let’s not kid ourselves: there may be small improvements, but we all know what’s coming. Another set of misguided technical regulations, and the same cycle repeating itself over and over again.

So what’s all this about? Basically, Bennetts decided to no longer be the title sponsor of the British Superbikes Championship, and a company called Zyn has replaced them. They make nicotine pouches and are a subsidiary of Philip Morris Products.

Oxford Products said on their website that:

“Promoting substance addiction is not compatible with our philosophy of MAKING LIFE ON BIKES BETTER.

“ZYN is manufactured by a subsidiary of tobacco giant Philip Morris International, so this would appear to be the latest attempt by big business to profit from selling addiction, just like the current vape epidemic.

“We do not believe that motorcycle race fans or indeed motorcyclists in general will benefit from the promotion of addiction in this way.

“Regretfully, we have to consider whether we wish to associate our brands with BSB, otherwise the pinnacle of motorcycle racing in the UK.”

Oxford Products has sponsored riders and teams for decades, but this does rather make things somewhat murky in the world of sponsorship ethics. Once a company enters the culture wars, it’s suddenly open to a wave of questions aimed at itself.

For example, we know the leather industry is horrific and barbaric. Yet it would appear the ethics of this are not an issue for Oxford Products, who list a large selection of leather-based products. Where do we draw the line here? Nicotine patches are bad but slaughter of animals for funnsies is OK?

I myself have often had to battle with the idea of promoting Superkarts. It wasn’t until the regulations changed to allow non-leather suits that I felt, to some degree, I could get involved. But it still torments me. I think a balance has to be struck. The situation was that you could only run leather suits in Superkarts, pretty much, and that situation has now gone and I can get involved myself without wearing leather if I was to drive, albeit not cheaply I may add. The balance is you no longer HAVE to wear leather to race, so for me that’s a reasonable step.

But what Oxford Products is doing now is creating a scenario, a kind of purity test. A test which, I believe, they fail. How can a company talk of ethical concerns and sell leather? What ethics are we talking about here? And to mention addiction, are high-powered superbikes for the road ethical? It raises so many accusations of hypocrisy.

Motorsport history is littered with brands sponsoring it that remain questionable. I am not sure how wise it is to start poking that bear unless you are as clean as possible yourself.