We all know that Formula One, Nascar, IndyCar, and rally racing are all slowly dying. They all had their golden days in the late 80s. F1 had the V6 turbos running against V12 engines. IndyCar was also big around that time with the Cart racing, when it was very close to how F1 was running. Rally car in the 80s had the infamous Killer Bees, or also known as Group B. Nascar was big in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They all were crazy at the height of their popularity, that’s why so many people went out to see all that racing. The cars then were slower than they were now, oddly enough. But there was one thing that they all had in common, they were close to grassroot racing.
I am a Go-Karter from Canada, and there isn’t that many go kart tracks or clubs that easy to get to or are easy to find. I have had people come to me saying they want to start go karting, but when they find out where it is and how much it will cost they don’t want to take part. There used to be a point where it was easy to take your daily driver and go the race track and still drive it home. Now that the times have changed, there are more restrictions to make the car safer. For good reasons, back in the 80s when your friend got in his or her race car there wasn’t that high of a chance of them coming home. That’s why the Group B rally and the Can-am racing series had come to an end, way too many deaths.
Grassroots racing is when you can drive what you can and with the budget, you can afford. In 2018 its getting very expensive to race a go kart at a regional club, or race your daily at a track day. Now I am no expert at the history, safety or the economics of motor racing, but what I can say is that it is getting harder and harder to afford to go racing with our friends.
There is one thing that is still a very strong grassroots racing league, and that is drifting. You can do it with almost every rear wheel drive car from cars that 300 bhp to cars that have 1,000 bhp, but they compete in Formula Drift. I had been reading about FD very recently and there aren’t many rules of how to build an FD ready car. All you need in basic form is a car with rear-wheel drive and have a safe enough roll bar (also a lot of other little safety bits, but I don’t know them all). You can run nitrous, have 1 or 2 turbos, run a supercharger, have a hybrid, but you don’t see that too often because people love to hear screaming engines. Formula Drift isn’t going away anytime soon because how easy it is get started in. Stock car racing is the same, you can buy a front engine Honda Civic for around $1,000 and put some safety stuff in the car and you are ready to go, but even that is starting to go away.
All of this is hurting the top of the food chain, Formula One. The reason why Fernando Alonso is still racing is because there are no good young drivers anymore, it's getting too expensive. Alonso learned how to start racing like I did, grassroots go-karting. There are a lot of kids who dream of becoming the next F1 star, but can’t afford to get started or move up into cars from karts. There are ways to make young kids make their way into racing, we just need money to make it happen. We might have to go to manufactures and tell them to make good affordable cars again, so we can race them like we did back in the good old days. In the end, I think we should take a page out of Formula Drift, look back at history and find a way to make younger kids like racing again.
