These preteen go-kart drivers are spending millions for a shot at F1 racing

kevin sieff

Wed, 11 Dec 2024, 1:17 pm·16-min read

Julian and Alessandro were walking to the starting line, trying their best not to look at each other. They wore child-size racing uniforms and tiny driving gloves. Behind them, mechanics pushed their 160-pound cars with a list of corporate sponsors on the hood. The team’s name was emblazoned on the side: Baby Race.

The two boys were Baby Race’s star drivers, among the favorites to win the World Series of Karting championship that was minutes away. In theory, they could work together to secure a team victory. But Alessandro Truchot and Julian Frasnelli had been fierce competitors since they were 9 and 10. Now they were 11 and 12, respectively, and the rivalry had grown violent, culminating in high-speed crashes that caused a roaring crowd to hold its breath.

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As its popularity has boomed, Formula One has faced a problem: how to identify future champions who can’t yet drive a car. Karting is the sport’s best approximation, a birthday party diversion that has been bankrolled and professionalized into a series of miniature Grand Prix races. Every current F1 driver started in a go-kart.

Julian and Alessandro’s race in Sarno was a battle for childhood pride, but it was also leverage in dueling quests to reach Formula One. The boys’ parents and sponsors had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their careers. Julian and Alessandro had stopped attending school full-time to focus on racing. They were too light for the karts, so mechanics added weights to the chassis to keep them from flipping over. Scouts representing Mercedes and Ferrari, who are now tracking drivers as young as 6, know their names.

Before they got to the pit, Julian removed his SpongeBob sandals, took off his helmet, vomited and cried. Alessandro, who wore only gray and black Nike apparel, repeated over the grunts of go-kart engines what he had said to himself many times before: “I’m not here to make friends.”

Elite go-karting has become both maniacally competitive and wildly expensive. To become one of Formula One’s 20 drivers - the sport has only 10 teams with two cars each - now requires an absolute commitment years before a child is eligible for a driver’s license.

By the time a driver makes it to Formula One, his parents and sponsors will have invested several million dollars in his career. Go-karting has become a magnet for the money and power flowing through motorsports. Baby Race charges its drivers $7,500 for a four-day race event (plus a $600 entrance fee).

The team motto: “The First Step to F1.”

Julian, who is Italian, and Alessandro, a French American citizen, represent different marks on the spectrum of go-karting wealth. Julian’s father owns a karting track in northern Italy, where he had finagled sponsors to finance his son’s career. Alessandro’s father started a string of technology companies that brought him enough wealth to bankroll the soaring costs of racing. The two families, who spend weekends under the same Baby Race tent, do not speak to each other.

When the Sarno race started, with the karts quickly nearing their top speed of 50 mph, even a casual fan could tell that Julian and Alessandro appeared to be in their own class.

“There goes Frasnelli,” the Australian commentator bellowed over the loudspeaker at the racing facility south of Naples. “There goes Truchot.”

The boys’ parents watched from opposite ends of the track, screaming, “Pass! Pass!” in French and Italian when their sons drove by in a blur. Julian and Alessandro had freakish control over their lawnmower-size vehicles, weaving expertly through a mass of other drivers. Julian had just won the Italian championships. Alessandro was the second-ranked driver on the karting tour. Either could be the next Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton, F1’s current superstars. But the chances that both boys will make it to Formula One are almost zero.

As they neared the end of the fourth lap, Julian was in second place and Alessandro was a few feet behind him. The two cars rocketed toward the front. But Julian and another driver made contact coming around a turn. Julian lost control. His kart went airborne.

“Huge crash!” the announcer exclaimed.

Julian’s father gripped the metal fence at the edge of the track and then put his hands on his face, almost covering his eyes.

“No, NO, NO!”

- - -

Fast and rich

Formula One scouts swear they can predict future greatness in the way a child handles a tight turn or avoids a crash. They’ve identified talent that way before.

At 6, Michael Schumacher, one of Formula One’s all-time greats, won a karting race with a vehicle his father put together with spare parts. In the early ’90s, Hamilton started racing in a secondhand kart while his father washed dishes to pay for races.

But the sport is now unrecognizable. The surge in global interest in Formula One has transformed karting into a kind of oligarchy. It is now crowded with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires (and actual oligarchs) who crisscross Europe every weekend for mini-Grand Prix. The circuit is a traveling carnival for the global elite, a series of racetrack parking lots colonized by parents in luxury athleisure wear.

There is effectively no way for young American drivers to aspire to Formula One without relocating across the Atlantic. Alessandro flies from Miami, where he lives, to Italy once a week during peak karting season. That’s where the F1 scouts spend their time.

The races are dominated by prestigious teams, like Baby Race, which supply personal mechanics to each child. Some kids arrive with their own bodyguards. Some arrive in helicopters. Many parents seek sports psychologists for their preteens. A number of Baby Race’s 25 drivers - it’s obvious which ones - are extremely wealthy and extremely average.

“I’m paying 50,000 euros a year for you to race like this?!” one of the lesser drivers’ fathers screamed at him one morning in Sarno.

Formula One’s popularity soared after a hit Netflix documentary series, bringing new sponsorship deals with luxury brands and some of the most expensive tickets in sports (the average ticket to the Las Vegas Grand Prix costs $1,600). Its annual revenue last year grew more than 25 percent to $3.2 billion. But the sport’s feeder leagues still operate under a system in which drivers pay to participate. Driving in F3 - the next step after karting - costs about $1.3 million per year. An F2 season costs at least $2 million.

“If you don’t have the budget, it’s getting tougher and tougher to make it,” said Giovanni Minardi, who runs a management agency that recruits kart drivers, in an interview.

Major Formula One teams now have driver academies where karting stars receive some financial support. But to make it on an academy’s radar, parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and often much more. As a result, the F1 teams have wrestled with the concentration of wealth among their recruiting pool.

“Are we scouting the biggest talent or are we just scouting the kids who are able to afford to do mini [karting]?” Gwen Lagrue, the driver development adviser for Mercedes-AMG Petronas’ Formula One team, asked in an interview.

Lagrue said Mercedes was scouring the karting tour for 12-year-old drivers whose success wasn’t just a product of their limitless resources. But as the sport’s barriers to entry rose, finding them was getting complicated.

The World Series of Karting championship in Sarno was therefore a window into the future of Formula One. The race captured the duel between Julian and Alessandro at its height, and glimpses of the kids who might make it. But everyone in Sarno knew the sport’s secret: It was becoming less meritocratic as it became more popular.

Julian knew his future depended on sponsors; he knew if his results slipped, the money would dry up.

Alessandro knew that being rich offered an entry point. But he didn’t want to buy his way onto the track. Winning was proof that he deserved to be there.

- - -

‘An internal battle’

Julian and Alessandro were both born into motorsports families.

Julian’s father, Martin, had been a competitive driver in Italy before he bought his own go-karting track. Alessandro’s father, Teddy, had raced karts in France and, after making a small fortune, bought a stake in a Formula Four team in Miami.

Martin put Julian in a kart when he was 8 (Julian said it gave him a stomachache). Teddy put Alessandro in a kart when he was 4. (Before his 8th birthday, Alessandro test-drove a full-size racecar).

Within weeks they were beating their fathers. Within months, they were entering races. Both fathers imagined their sons on F1 podiums.

When he turned 10, Julian’s father raised enough money for him to join Parolin, a top karting team. Alessandro was already on the team.

At one race in Sarno, their karts collided around a tight turn. Each blamed the other. It was the beginning of a rivalry that produced remarkably fast times - and more crashes. Even karting officials noticed.

“An internal battle” is how ACI, the Italian karting league, put it in a press release.

Teddy Truchot believed the competition was making his son faster and more ruthless. Martin Frasnelli saw it differently. “They can spend and spend and spend. I’m just a normal worker. I need to find a way to pay for this,” he said.

By 2024, the boys both joined Baby Race. It was the best team with the most sophisticated technology. Using sensors in the karts, coaches and mechanics could tell when drivers were losing a hundredth of a second around a tight turn by braking too late or veering too wide. The team was run by Alessio Lorandi, a former karting star who had made it to Formula Two.

Lorandi quickly realized that his two top drivers were obsessed with beating each other.

“It was crazy. You have these two talented drivers who would rather kill each other than cooperate to help the team,” he said.

Lorandi had seen how the rivalries between children translated into fights between parents. He knew that was partially a by-product of the sport’s soaring costs. Parents were trying to protect their investments.

“There are times when you have to tear the parents apart or tell them to leave the tent,” he said.

But even as Lorandi tried to dampen the tension between Julian and Alessandro, his blunt, win-at-all-costs coaching style could sometimes inflame it.

When one of them made a mistake, Lorandi would let loose.

“I don’t know what the f— you’re doing,” he told Alessandro after a bad heat in Sarno.

When one won a heat, he would praise them.

“He’s the only one here who came to race this weekend,” he said of Julian in front of the team.

The boys took different approaches to the rivalry. Julian was more blunt about it.

“I mean, we’re the top two drivers so what do you expect?”

Alessandro went out of his way not to acknowledge any competition with Julian.

“I’m competing against everyone, not just him.”

Julian overheard that comment and chimed in, a tint of disappointment in his voice: “You don’t think we even have a liiiittle bit of a rivalry?”

The boys were aware of the determinative role that money played in the sport. But they saw racing as something pure, a function of talent and hard work. They were two boys driving the same cars on the same tracks. They were intensely focused on winning, which, for them was an incorruptible, if sometimes depleting, mission.

Perhaps more than any other sport, young drivers can appear like children pretending to be adults, surrounded by expensive gear and support teams, taking tight turns at freeway speeds, giving choreographed postrace interviews. Minutes later, they’re sharing memes on TikTok and farting in each other’s helmets.

Both kids suspected there was only one way their rivalry would end. One of them would eventually drop out of the sport. Either their money would dry up, or their talent - which once seemed boundless - would reach its limit.

They tried to imagine what they would do if they fell short of F1. They could try NASCAR or IndyCar, which also recruits top karters. And if they weren’t professional drivers?

“I could be a fisherman,” Alessandro said.

“Maybe a soccer player,” Julian added.

Both of them laughed. The idea of not being a driver was so inconceivable as to be ridiculous.

- - -

‘An insane decision’

Leading up to the final in Sarno, Alessandro and Julian had tried to navigate their rivalry under the Baby Race tent.

Their cars were positioned next to each other on elevated platforms. The boys took turns reviewing footage of their heats and dissecting data from each bend of the sinuous track. Alessandro was losing a fraction of a second on the third turn. Julian was braking too early on the fifth. They made notations and snuck glances at each other.

The tension sometimes broke through the surface. During one heat, when Julian lost his position, he accused Alessandro of hitting his rear bumper. He brought the claim to Lorandi, who promised to review the footage of the heat.

Julian’s allegation circulated across the parents’ side of the tent, which could sometimes feel like a high school cafeteria.

“It’s not true,” one of the mothers said. “That boy is always blaming other kids.”

When the footage was reviewed, it turned out that the two cars had not made contact. Alessandro, exonerated, approached one of the assistant coaches who had appeared to support Julian’s account.

“Don’t do that again,” he said and punched the coach lightly - but not that lightly - on the back.

A few feet away from the Baby Race tent, the Forza team had set up. Forza was one of the top teams in the next division, called the juniors, for kids between 12 and 14. They drove slightly bigger, more powerful karts that could reach 80 mph. Alessandro wandered over to them, the teenagers towering over him as he vented about life on Baby Race.

The parents of the older kids had slightly wearier expressions than the ones in the Baby Race tent. They were spending even more per race - about $10,000 - and their children were on the precipice of a much deeper commitment as they neared Formula Four.

In financial terms, the parking lot in Sarno was full of incredibly successful parents making an incredibly bad investment.

“It’s an absolutely insane decision to be a part of this sport,” sighed Matt Iliffe, the father of a Forza driver.

It seemed likely that Julian and Alessandro were bound for the same junior team, which meant another two years of trying to defeat a teammate, with higher stakes.

Julian was curled up in a camping chair, playing racing games on his phone when he saw Alessandro talking to the Forza kids. He put down his phone and tried to listen in, but the roar of karting engines made eavesdropping impossible.

The whole week had been like that - eight minutes of racing followed by hours of down time where the two boys subtly scrutinized each other and then pretended not to care.

On the track, Julian and Alessandro were back and forth in the heats leading up to the final, an eight-lap contest. When Julian’s engine blew out, Alessandro swerved around him. When Alessandro took one corner too wide, Julian streaked by him.

Both boys knew that the F1 scouts weren’t looking for a driver who won every heat. It was the final that mattered. Everyone would be watching.

- - -

The Final

When two go-karts collide, one of them usually sputters into the infield, where the driver waits, often in tears, for the race to finish. But sometimes, when a kart is clipped at a high speed, the child goes tumbling across the track, strapped to a flying vehicle three times his weight.

Until the kart stops rolling and the child crawls out, it is difficult not to feel complicit in the danger and absurdity of karting.

When Julian’s kart collided with a competitor in the fourth lap of the final in Sarno, it flew across track and he landed perpendicular to the oncoming drivers, skidding on his back wheels. The other driver careened into the grass.

Julian was able to steady his kart and get back in the race. But he had gone from second to 12th place in an instant. Alessandro charged past him along with Santiago Diaz de la Vega, a Baby Race driver from Mexico.

Julian tried to regain his position. He passed one driver and then another. But the top few drivers, followed by Alessandro and Santiago, were now 20 meters ahead of him with four laps to go.

Alessandro and Santiago chased the lead drivers through the bell lap. But the Dutch-Spanish 11-year-old Daniel Mirón had too big of a lead. He pumped his fist as he crossed the finish line. Santiago was third. Alessandro was fourth, a result he would later blame in part on a mechanical problem. Julian finished eighth of 31 drivers.

When the boys left the pit lane, their parents were waiting behind the fence, like a bizarre after-school pickup. Santiago was the only one smiling. Julian kept his helmet on so no one could see him cry. Alessandro was composed but expressionless, staring into the middle distance.

When the award ceremony was held, Mirón, the winner, held the trophy above his head while the Dutch national anthem played over a loudspeaker.

By then, the Baby Race tent was being dismantled. The karts were battered, their tires bald. Lorandi, the team’s manager, walked by with his head down, deflated.

Alessandro’s father tried to decide whether they would fly back to Miami via Dubai or Paris. Julian’s father considered whether to share the disappointing race results with his son’s sponsors.

It didn’t matter that the crash hadn’t been Julian’s fault. The results would be published without explanation or asterisks. In a few months he would graduate to the junior category, assuming there was enough money to pay for his next team.

But for now, Julian put his SpongeBob sandals back on and slumped into a folding chair while his kart was packed up.