Motorsport doesn’t work the way a lot of people seem to think. You see the news stories about drivers being signed to teams and think “wow, that person is a professional racing driver”! Most racing drivers who get any money get it from family at first and commercial sponsors will come many years later! Most of the money your family puts in (your first sponsors) gets spent with the team you are signed to. As a driver you are usually more like a customer than an employee of a team.
Even many Formula One drivers are really customers who pay the teams for their drives and its not just the drivers who race in the GPs. Martin Brundle said on TV this year that even a lot of the test drivers pay the teams £2million or more to do testing or drive in the simulators. Obviously, some drivers are paid by the teams. They are people who attract sponsorship and results, like world champions.
I met Lewis Hamilton’s dad, Anthony Hamilton, and even he said in the early 90s it cost £5million to get Lewis to F1. It took many years to get anywhere near that money for them but he had the vision to start much younger than I did when karting is a lot cheaper. Well, maybe ‘cheaper’ is the wrong word!
Even in karting, the amount of money people spend is huge! One national series that has a lot of F1 names associated with it charges £35,000 for 6 race weekends!
Only 20% of people in the UK earn more than £35k a year and the amount of UK families that can actually comfortably afford this will be in the very top percentile. It also has to be considered the race series will have to be supplemented by other karting activities to keep sharp. Your Average Joe will still be on the sidelines looking on. As it is, only a tiny percent of young drivers will get the chance to enter this championship. If the championship was free then your pool of talent expands, massively.
I was invited to race in that series but my dad just couldn’t afford it. Also, by the time you do all the other karting activities to keep sharp, you will easily spend £55,000 or more in one year! Some drivers in Super One karting (a national championship) spend over £100,000 in a year out of their own pockets! You can do a whole season in Ginetta Junior Sports Cars racing for that much!!
Instead, we got by in club-racing on a tight budget and made up for our lack of money by doing work for the kart team I was with to cover some of the costs. Lots of people told us we wouldn’t have a hope of making it because we weren’t rich. We were also told to forget BTCC unless you are a millionaire and forget F1 unless you are a billionaire!
For drivers who aren’t from wealthy families it is hard to compete because, as my dad keeps telling me, experience + talent = skill and it’s skill that wins races. It takes lots of practice and hard work to get the experience part of that formula. In motorsport, that experience costs big money. Luckily, he also told me you have to go for your dreams and look for ways to do things differently!
We did do things differently and it worked! I was spotted by Tony Gilham of BTCC regulars Team HARD and he found enough backing to give me a fighting chance. It’s still not enough to pay for a whole season and my dad has to promise to pay the rest while we find more sponsors.
We aren’t poor, because we wouldn’t be able to do this at all but my family really can’t afford for me to be racing. This is why, with my dad’s help (because I was too young to sign up) I started trying to do CrowdFunding in 2014.
My dad gives money to charity whenever he can but one day I saw him donating on a crowd-funding site for a technology project, not a charity. All he got in return was a thank you. I asked him why he did it. He said it was because he really believed in the people and what they were trying to do. It wasn’t much he donated. He told me it works because lots of people were donating £10, £25 (and sometimes more) and because of that this group of people got their project going.
That’s what gave me the idea to try this as a way of raising more money towards my racing. It was also because my dad was talking about selling lots of things to get more money to support me and I really didn’t want him to do that. I won’t even let him buy me birthday & christmas presents because to me my racing is all of that and a lot more! He’d already given up holidays had to delay basic household maintenance and basically give up his whole life to support me. Even then, he makes me awesome gifts like printed t-shirts or pictures on a canvas I can hang on the wall.
Anyway, it felt like it was either crowd-funding or just give up and accept what everyone kept saying… that you can only make it if you are rich. So, I said we HAD TO give it a go!
We have been very lucky that people have donated a total of over £2000. Compared to the numbers I’ve given you that’s not a lot, but to us it is. When people made donations, it almost always came at just the right time! Just when we didn’t know how we were going to afford our next racing bill! To say thank you to all those people (and anyone who joins them) I have added all of your names to this Supporters Page. Your names will be on my site forever because if it wasn’t for you I might not have even made it this far. I could have missed an important race or missed out on a critical practice day. That could have been one of the days that lead me to where I am now, getting ready for a season in the VW Racing Cup!
Thank you for seeing my potential and investing in me. I hope I have made you proud and can go on to be a success. My success is your success! Please continue to share the campaign with people you know. The more people who donate the better chance I have.
The costs of preparing for my new season in cars are getting bigger and bigger and I need your help now, more than ever! Just for my helmet, neck-restraint and race suit it’s going to cost as much as £1500! So please keep sharing the link to my campaign and help me find my next few backers. Let people know that donating even £5 helps to keep the campaign active and encourages other people to give their support too. If I am going to have a chance at showing what I can do and attracting more commercial sponsors I need you there with me. Help me to be the one who makes it against all these odds. It’s amazing what as little as £5 can do!
A Drive To Drive, Crowd Funding, money in motorsport, VW Racing Cup
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