Progression In Racing

It seems that a drivers progression into big time motorsports has more to do with dollars then talent these days, even the sport of Kart Racing is getting more and more expensive to compete at a high level.

There is an abundance of young driving talent in America right now but the problem is there are too few rides available, and the extremely high costs of racing in the big time are just too high for the majority of the people to afford.

It is a shame to see this talent go to waste strictly because of financial restraints but that seems to be the nature of the beast. On a positive note, with the emergence of television shows like Jack Roush's The Gong Show it seems like this trend may start to turn around. Although I never really have been a huge fan of reality television this is an unprecedented idea in motorsports.............Find some talented drivers and make them race for the ride............Brilliant.............It is my wish that more and more teams would undertake this type of talent search.

I feel that the drivers that we have in North America rival that of anywhere in the world, but racing it seems, is taken alot more seriously in other parts of the world, like Europe, and drivers begin their training at a much younger age then they do here. It's a lifestyle, here in America it's Football, look at the variety of levels of play that a young boy can do starting at the very young age. In countries like Italy, Germany and France Racing is so extremely popular that us North Americans can't even imagine.

Around 1995 or 1996 I had the opportunity to travel to the Karting World Championships in Lonato Italy, and let me tell you this was an experience like no other, there were 50 000 spectators at a Go-Kart race. This amazed me because I was used to seeing maybe 20 spectators here in the US. I actually had the privilege of meeting two people from Germany that had been backpacking across Europe for a couple of months just to attend some races, and yes believe it or not the Karting World Championships was one of them.

It amazed me that these two people actually ranked the Kart race up there with the Formula 1 race at Monza, and the Italian leg of the Moto GP as a must attend event..................However it seemed that 50 000 people agreed with them.

Racing is a very fickle sport, sometimes I think it would be easier to become an astronaut and land on the moon then it would be to land a seat in a race car and that is a shame, an American Race car driver is a rare occurrence anymore in open wheel racing and that is a huge disappointment to me because I feel it is a huge waste of our talented drivers.

Francis