The ambition behind an ‘insane’ racing opportunity

The Shenington kart circuit on a cold, wet, miserable day in February is not the most obvious setting for a piece of motorsport history to be made. But the humble Oxfordshire venue was recently the starting point of a new five-day FAT Racing Shootout for one of the most lucrative prizes in car racing. Four teenagers were battling it out to secure a fully-funded season in British Formula 4, a reward worth approaching £500,000. 

The quartet were all at the wheel of FAT Karting League machinery having starred in the contest’s World Finals in California last year. But the soaking Shenington circuit meant for a tricky start to the abundance of assessments they would face. 

“It’s very damp, it’s very cold – my shoes are full of water right now!” laughs Ellis McKenzie when sheltering in the dry with Autosport during a gap between one of four runs on track, the Briton having secured his shootout spot after winning the ‘light’ World Final. 

For Illinois native Jackson Wolny, the conditions were far more alien. “It’s rough,” admits one of the shootout’s two wildcard entries, having placed third in the ‘heavy’ final. “In America we don’t race much in the wet at all. We’re on slicks and the karts are extremely torquey so all that combined is very difficult.” 

The reason they had all assembled in the rain was down to the inspirational vision of one person: former F1 engineer Rob Smedley. The ex-Jordan, Ferrari and Williams man sought to democratise motorsport when he created an electric arrive-and-drive karting series in 2023, aiming to widen participation to the masses.  

“I’d had my career in Formula 1, I knew I wanted a break from it but didn’t know what I wanted to do – and I knew nothing about the world of motorsport outside F1,” he explains. “I had been so naive because I’d lived in this very well-funded bubble and then you come out and think, ‘Wow, the grassroots is a different world’.

“You look at what the costs are and think, ‘This is totally inaccessible’. We’re not finding talent, we’re just finding the most talented kids who can afford it. And this doesn’t work. The whole infrastructure and ecosystem of the grassroots didn’t seem that healthy.  

“Then I started to think about how could I help. Maybe I could bring that F1 experience and ways of thinking down. And I rapidly came to the conclusion that the only way to fix it is to start with a blank sheet of paper. And that’s why we started FAT Karting League. I put some money behind it, got some guys together and said, ‘This is what I think it should look like. If it’s £100k to do national karting, we want to do national karting with a discount of 95%.’

Tricky karting conditions were “rough” for Illinois native Wolny

“And we ended up with a 96% discount and I’m still very cognisant that £4k is a lot of money. Our job is to grow this at scale and to keep pushing the price point down. For every 1% you bring the price down, you open up your demographic by 10%.”  

While Smedley has successfully introduced the concept – with FKL series being held in the UK and various states in America, all leading to last year’s inaugural World Finals – his attention then turned to the next step beyond karting. “One part is just to get more kids participating, ignite some passion and give them something to do that’s not sitting on a PlayStation and give them access to a sport that was totally inaccessible before,” he says. “That is mission part A.  

“Mission part B is that, if we’re putting 100,000 kids through this programme every year, we’re going to find organically even without trying some very talented kids, so what do we do with those at the top? And I didn’t really think about that when I started – my main focus was just getting kids involved. I’ve kind of created my own first-world problem.

“If you can afford £4000 to do FKL, you’re in and you can win it and then you can get to the World Finals and you can win that, but the next step is to do British F4, or US F4 or Italian F4 and somehow find a budget of a million euros. You’ve just moved the problem up a level.  

“It’s an academy and you’re there on merit, so you may progress to the next step or you may not and that’s like any academy. But at least there’s a chance to showcase” Rob Smedley

“That’s where we started the idea of FAT Racing. We have to do something that’s a pathway that’s fully funded. We will enter into the classic pathway of F4, F3, F2. We’ve created a talent incubator and we’re taking that talent and putting them on the next step.” 

But Smedley has aims of supporting more than just one driver – in the coming years there could be up to a dozen funded F4 racers competing around the world. “It could be four in the UK, it could be four in the States and four in Asia so, as we’re growing the karting estate, there’s an outlet for the elite drivers,” he adds.

“It’s an academy and you’re there on merit, so you may progress to the next step or you may not and that’s like any academy. But at least there’s a chance to showcase. We’ve created a pathway where talented kids can come through the ranks.” 

And that pathway leads us back to Shenington. Here it was the drivers’ ability behind the wheel of karts in challenging conditions that was being tested. But after that there were a range of simulator, fitness, media and psychometric assessments before the one they were all looking forward to: experiencing F4 machinery at the Spanish Guadix circuit. Smedley knew from his F1 experience what he was looking for from the contenders – and it was not just about who was the fastest. 

Smedly knows how to spot “key ingredients” in a driver, having worked so closely with Massa at Ferrari

Photo by: Sutton Images via Getty Images

“I’ve worked with great drivers, I’ve worked with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, and you get to see the difference between the greats and the very goods,” he reveals. “It’s made up of two things. It’s how fast you can drive a racing car, but all drivers in F1 can drive a racing car fast, that’s a given.

“Then it’s those tiny little nuances around a driver’s psychometric make-up that turn them into a great – how fast can they process information, how good are they at feeding back, more importantly how resilient are they?  

“If this works, and you get to F1 with us, this is going to be a long, hard journey. This is a brutal, brutal environment and you have to be resilient. We’ve got a really broad range of environments to test the drivers’ skills, but then we’re also very much focused on psychometric testing. How will a kid who’s been great in karts adapt to F4? How much spare capacity do you have? We’re looking for all of that. 

“I would probably cite Felipe [Massa] in this. When Felipe first came to Ferrari, he wasn’t a complete driver by his own admission, there were a lot of gaps. But he was so fast and he was also resilient as well. He was tough on the outside and he was desperate for it – this was his big chance – so he had those key ingredients.

“The rest of the stuff, tyre management, skills on the in-lap, all of that we could teach, but you can’t do that without those key ingredients and that’s what we’re looking for here. If they can’t [perform at that level], we shouldn’t have them in the car. This is a meritocracy not a charity, we’re here to drive talent further up the pathway and get them to F1.” 

The teenagers in the FAT Racing Shootout were certainly desperate to impress, especially when having the chance to sample F4 machinery for the first time – even if the rain did follow them to Spain. All of the data was then pored over to ensure the right driver was selected. McKenzie and Wolny were joined by ‘heavy’ final winner Californian Shea Aldrich and Scotland-based South African Monde-Jnr Konini, another wildcard.

And in the end it was Wolny who secured the “awesome” prize. “I was screaming – I was so excited!” he recalls of the moment he found out. “My whole life’s pretty much changed. I’ve moved here [to the UK], I’ve got to drive an F4 car a few times again already, which is insane and so fun.” 

Wolny admits he was unsure if his shootout performances were good enough. “A lot of the stuff, like the simulators especially, I think I underperformed,” confesses the 16-year-old. “Even in the car, it took me too long to adjust. Technically on the sheets I was quickest, but we didn’t know which way it was going to go.” 

Smedley knew that resilience is a key attribute, and looked for that in the finalists

Yet it did go his way and the American is aware of the size of the challenge ahead as he hurriedly readies for the F4 campaign with Xcel Motorsport. He will be up against a crop of talented sophomores and faces a frenetic start with four events in just over a month.

But he can prepare for the season safe in the knowledge that he does not have to worry about funding. He contrasts that with his previous racing in Mazda MX-5s in the States, when Wolny says he was “almost a businessman”. “This is so much better, I’m actually like an athlete now,” he says gratefully. “I’m focused on driving, focused on my craft and I can truly try to improve.” 

But for Smedley, Wolny represents just the start of this journey. His six-year vision includes being in 50 different markets, 100,000 kids a year competing in his karting series with “a minimum of 15 in an elite athlete programme and one of them is in Formula 1”.

And Smedley is far from alone in that ambition. Having originally invested a significant sum of his own money in the project, Ferdi Porsche – who revived the FAT International name that sponsored the 1994 Le Mans-winning 962 – is now his business partner.

“It’s not just this tiny island of motorsport geeks, it’s a community. You may not be able to afford the karting, but you can afford the T-shirt and you’re creating a million-person race team” Rob Smedley

The board of directors also features a wealth of people with the funding to make Smedley’s dreams a reality, including the likes of Tio Chaharbaghi – a Canadian hedge fund manager from humble stock who previously supported drivers from underrepresented backgrounds via his Rebelleo Racing concern. 

Smedley even targets taking the FAT Racing brand beyond the track. “I also wanted it to be something that was cool, resonated with kids and was about music, art and fashion and you bring all that together,” he explains.

“It’s not just this tiny island of motorsport geeks, it’s a community. You may not be able to afford the karting, but you can afford the T-shirt and you’re creating what Ferdi calls a million-person race team.  

“My long-suffering wife finds it quite amusing and her position is, ‘You couldn’t have just started a small team with two or three people could you, you had to go big and try to rule the world!’ And I’m like, ‘Yep!’” For the sake of all those underfunded aspiring drivers now receiving incredible opportunities, the world of motorsport should be glad Smedley did indeed ‘go big’.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the May 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Wolny can now focus on British F4 without budget worries