Becoming world champion for £100k

They say the fastest way to make a small fortune in motor racing is to start off with a large one.

It's a cliche no less true for being oft repeated; scan the entry list of last weekend's Australian Grand Prix and you'll note that half the drivers on the grid either bring a budget or have had their careers substantially underwritten by a certain energy-drink sugar daddy.

Factor in the plethora of 'test' and 'development' drivers whose backers have paid handsomely for them to, in effect, hang out in the paddock, and that proportion increases massively.

It doesn't have to be so. A driver can reach world championship level without spending ridiculous amounts in the process. At AUTOSPORT we believe that 2012 World Touring Car Champion Rob Huff may have been the most cost-efficient driver to have reached the top of their profession in recent years, helped earlier in his career by winning crucial scholarships on merit. And he continues to earn a decent salary for his racing.

As it happens, the Huff family has audited its spend on his career; and, while the total amount is rather more than you could expect to find down the back of the sofa, the complete journey from karting rookie to salaried pro cost less than the budget for one season in entry-level single-seaters.

Having started in Formula Renault and Clios, Huff's career took off in SEATs © LAT

"It's just into six figures," Huff says. "This is what we've spent as a family from day one of karting, the £25 here, the 150 quid there. It's all been noted throughout, all been documented. I'm not even sure why we know what it is. We've been lucky and we've had a lot of help along the way."

Though he raced karts in his youth, Huff, unusually for a professional driver at this level, did not venture into Europe, or even race two-stroke karts at all. He progressed, as he explains, through a combination of happy accident and enthusiasm.

"My passion for motorsport was very much installed in me by my father, Peter, as a young child," he says. "He was a huge fan of motorsport, always has been. He and a load of his friends would go to Le Mans each year. Dad knew Will Hoy because they were in the same business [chartered surveyors], so we would go to some British Touring Car races. Dad had another friend who was racing in Group C.

"When I was 10, I was old enough to get in a kart, at the Anglia indoor centre down in Ipswich. At the end of the day, we all did a race and I won it. The guy running the day was called Jason, and he pulled dad to one side and said, 'I think your boy might have something here.'

"My family have never had motorsport money but my dad has been successful in his career, and he could afford to take me karting. We started doing a lot of indoor karting and the natural progression was to outdoor karting. And so we started off doing the twin-engined Prokart stuff at Milton Keynes, at PF International, Buckmore Park... When I was around 16 we bought our own one and we starting 'Huffing Racing'.

"All I ever raced was twin-engine karts. We didn't know of this two-stroke, 100cc TKM stuff; we knew nothing about motorsport other than my dad being a fan. We did it because dad loved it, I loved it, and it was father-and-son time on a weekend.

Success in the Cupra Cup earned him a BTCC deal in works Toledo © LAT

"I think I just did a year in that before I got asked by one of the works teams to go and race for them. When I was 17 years old I was being paid to race a Prokart."

Though Prokarts are less agile than their two-stroke brethren, the endurance-race format offered plenty of seat time and opportunities to develop racecraft in a tightly contested category, surrounded by manufacturer teams.

Winning an Ironman event at Daytona earned Huff the prize of a test in a Formula Jedi at Donington Park, and the chance to experience a racing car on a large-scale track for the first time.

For his 18th birthday Huff's parents bought him a one-week intensive course at the legendary Jim Russell racing school, which led to a scholarship to run in what would become the final Formula Vauxhall Junior Championship.

Huff won four rounds - including the first two - to lift the title, joining a roster of champions that includes Dario Franchitti, Antonio Pizzonia and Gary Paffett. Huff's team-mate Joey Foster would go on to win the Walter Hayes Trophy Formula Ford 1600 showpiece three times.

Huff also raced a historic MGB owned by John Wilsher in the BCV8 Championship, courtesy of the extended friends-and-family network.

His parents found the wherewithal to place him in the four-round Formula Palmer Audi Winter Series at the end of 2000, where he raced against, among others, future works BMW sportscar racer Joey Hand.

Relationship with Mallock sparked an 11-year (and counting) WTCC stint © LAT

Eventual champion Phil Giebler progressed to A1GP and Indy Lights, and qualified for the Indy 500 in 2007.

"We started thinking, 'This is getting a bit serious now'," says Huff. "Kimi Raikkonen had just won Formula Renault and gone to Formula 1, so the next thing on the list was Formula Renault.

"We managed to somehow get half the budget together, mainly through my father and his friends and contacts. Two of his very good friends helped me a lot. But we only had half the budget, and halfway through the season it was all over.

"There was no opportunity to raise [more] budget because we just don't come from the background where that's possible. We knew no one in motorsport; this was all just my dad steering the ship the way that he could. Even at this point, there was no real thought that this could be a career.

We were doing this as a family, as father and son, nice weekends out, just a bit of fun. And it made it even more fun when you were doing well.

"I think it was my sister, who for some random reason was reading a car magazine and found a scholarship, bearacingdriver.com, which was set up by Tim Sugden. Off the top of my head, it was £600 to enter and 1000 people entered. After the elimination process, I was very luckily the last man standing."

The prize was a full season in the Renault Clio Cup UK, which had provided success on the way to the British Touring Car Championship for John Bintcliffe (and, during a four-year interregnum with Renault Sport Spider weaponry, Jason Plato, Dan Eaves and Andy Priaulx). The 2002 season was a vintage one for the series and featured Andrew Kirkaldy, Daniel Buxton, Martin Byford, Daniel Stilp and Paul Rivett.

Macau crash almost ruined Huff's 2012 title challenge... © LAT

"There were some good names in that championship," says Huff. "It was a full grid. In my first-ever year of saloon cars we finished third in the championship. It was a tough year and I really learned a lot.

"About halfway through that season, SEAT announced the new Cupra Championship that they were doing - one make, all run by the same team under one roof. It was £75,000 to enter.

"I owe a lot to dad on that one because between us we worked really hard, and we came up with all of the money. He put in a big chunk, we did some really good stuff with sponsorship and got a lot of people involved. That was the biggest amount of money we ever raised ourselves.

"I was the first person to sign up for the Cupra Championship and I just kept telling myself every single day, 'I'm going to win this... I'm going to win it.' I knew it was my last chance of being able to go anywhere after that."

Huff's determination saw him through to victory in the championship, with the prize of a works SEAT BTCC drive with RML, a salary of £30,000, use of a flat in Monaco, and Jason Plato as a team-mate.

"At that point," he says, "I thought, 'Wow, I could make a living out of being a racing driver.'"

By his own admission, Huff's first year in the BTCC was difficult ("Finding the limit is not easy and when you do find the limit it tends to end badly"), and there were plenty of mistakes, but he won at Brands Hatch and Snetterton and finished seventh in the championship. It was enough to squeeze in to RML's new project, running the Chevrolet Lacetti in the World Touring Car Championship.

...but Huff rallied to join the likes of Sebs Loeb and Vettel as a world champion © LAT

"Ray Mallock and Eric Neve [Chevrolet's motorsports boss] called me and I signed a three-year contract with them. I was lucky that Ray liked me as a person, and Chevrolet wanted a young driver - they'd already got [Alain] Menu and [Nicola] Larini and they wanted an up-and-comer to support.

"I feel very privileged and proud that they chose me, because eight years later, to be able to repay them with the world championship was a very proud moment."

Huff's title triumph in 2012 was tinged with the knowledge that Chevrolet was withdrawing from the WTCC and RML would require drivers with budget from then on.

He considered selling shares in himself - as Justin Wilson once did - but "it was a lot easier to find five or six million quid to put yourself in an F1 car than to find five or six hundred grand to go touring car racing."

Fortunately privateer Rene Munnich fancied the notion of having the number one in his stable, and signed a one-year deal with Huff for 2013. At the end of the season a chance conversation with James Thompson opened the door to another salaried drive, this time with Lada.

Team boss Viktor Shapovalov's plans involved first expanding to a three-car entry, then fielding a new car. All the signs are that the new Vesta is the most competitive Lada yet. Huff has, indeed, led a charmed career; this period feels less like a coda than a reboot.

"I had probably the most enjoyable year of my life last year," he says. "And suddenly everything seems to have evolved 30 years overnight. We're going to properly show them the way this year!"