Head Start in Karts

On the grid, minutes before the start of a British Grand Prix in August, the drivers' faces are grim with concentration. The pre-race interviews are over, and the glamour models in hotpants are tottering off the circuit. Fans are screaming from a packed grandstand. Squeezed into his driving seat, wearing a red, white and yellow jumpsuit and white helmet, Trevyn-Jay Nelson is pulling on a pair of tight black gloves. No question where he's expecting to finish: "First," he says before flicking down his gold visor. At the start signal, with a burst of engine noise, the drivers dart down to the first turn.

Related

Photos

Fast in Karts

It all sounds a lot like Formula One, but there's a difference: Nelson is all of 8 years old. It isn't the throaty whine of motor sport's biggest competition you hear as he and the other drivers power around this neat, twisting circuit in rural Lincolnshire, but the higher-pitched buzz of karting.

What could be seen as child's play is in fact a proving ground for the pros. The current leader in the Formula One drivers' championship, rookie Lewis Hamilton, 22, first picked up speed piloting karts as an 8-year-old. And he's not alone, even on his Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team. Hamilton's teammate and rival at McLaren, current world champion Fernando Alonso, started out racing the mini machines too. In fact, almost all of today's Formula One drivers, as well as past greats like Brazilian Ayrton Senna and Germany's Michael Schumacher, owe a debt to the experience first gained in a small plastic bucket seat.

That track record makes karting a must for youngsters keen to copy their heroes. After Schumacher picked up the first of his seven Formula One titles in 1994, Germany's domestic karting championship took off, says Vincent Caro, executive secretary of the International Karting Commission, which is part of the FIA, world motor sport's governing body. Successive world championships for Alonso have inspired a karting boom in Spain, Caro says, and now traffic is building on the U.K.'s kart tracks too. Hamilton's record-breaking season — he's won three of the 14 races so far, becoming the youngest-ever driver to lead the world championship — has left circuits reporting a "surge in demand," says Graham Smith, secretary of the Association of British Kart Clubs. In the race to become the next Hamilton, karting is "fundamental to any young driver," says Christian Horner, team principal at Formula One's Red Bull Racing team.

The machines have come a long way from the first karts pieced together from steel tubing and lawnmower engines in late 1950s California. Sure, karts typically lack gears, and there's no suspension to speak of. But there's often a push-button starter, a hydraulic disk brake, and a tiny onboard computer that measures everything from average speed to G-force. In the cadet class for the youngest competitive drivers like Nelson, the karts' 60-cc engines clock speeds of around 50 m.p.h. (80 km/h). The junior classes — open to racers from around 12 — have 100-cc to 125-cc motors that top 75 m.p.h. (120 km/h) on a typical 1-km circuit. Engines get even faster in the senior classes for older teenagers.