Whilton has become a bit of a hub in terms of karting in the UK. A lot of periphery clubs aren’t doing so well, so a lot of people have migrated to the central region for their club stuff. Growth within an overall diminishing market kinda thing.
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One thing to understand here in the US compared to anything in Europe is that travel costs are ridiculous here. Even with gas being lower, most teams run on diesel trucks and diesel ranges from $4-$6/gallon state to state.
RPG is based in the Pacific NW. That big rig costs a LOT of money to move. Add on the fact that when it’s taking days to cross the country to races, you’ve also got additional labor costs, and for most teams, that’s hotel nights as well with them only owning pickup trucks.
An F4 season in Europe is also significantly cheaper than an F4 season over here for the same reasons. And the US F4 Series typically stays on the eastern half of the country anyway.
Sure, equipment costs more here due to overseas shipping and the need for US distributors and then dealers / retailers for a proper supply chain, but in my opinion, the biggest reason for our team costs being higher is due to the massive travel haul. The population spread adds to that. Every mechanic flies everywhere. Every data guy flies everywhere. That means a flight plus a rental car. Whereas I’m sure in the UK, most mechanics and teams can easily drive from Whilton to PFI and back around. The same goes for the CIK/WSK-oriented Italian organizations.
And because the travel costs are so massive, the travel plus labor total usually accounts for more of the budget than the equipment. Which is why you hear from many how ‘car racing is cheaper’ or ‘car racing is not that much more expensive’. Because if 60-70% of the budget is travel and labor, then only 30% of the overall budget increases when you move to a more expensive vehicle.
For example, most Mazda MX-5 Cup teams charge between 1-2 thousand dollars per day for support, plus a mileage split on travel. With a 3-day format, that means at maximum a 6,000 tent fee charge. That is not far off from our national kart teams. If you’re able to stomach the upfront cost of the car, which does hold its value like a street car so you can resell at 60% more or less when you’re done, then all of a sudden, the equation isn’t that bad. Plus, their championship prize totals are massive.
If you own an MX5 Cup Car, which is between 90-110k new, the season cost including your own travel will probably be under 100k. Run inside the top 5/10 each weekend and finish top 5 in points, and you’ve pretty much broke even. Win the title for $250,000, and you’ve profited or paid back the cost of your car.
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Now I know we are strictly talking karting in this thread.
But in most drivers and families cases their focus is on the net cost of it all. Not dividing by total number of days or laps.
And so when you’ve got a national race weekend that includes 5 days of on track time from Wednesday to Sunday like these Orlando races have been, you’re looking at:
- 6 nights of hotel, if not 7, depending of whether or not you’re needed on-site to build your kart and space out on move-in day.
$125/night x 7 = $875 USD
-
2 days of unofficial testing
$125/day + 2 x $20/passes = $300 USD -
4 sets of tires for practice, 1 for each test day, 2 for final practice on friday since you need new for the last session to set your qualifying group, plus 2 sets of tires for the racedays.
$250/set x 6 = $1500 USD
- A mid tier team would be between $2500-$5000 for that week for support. Assuming you own your own equipment, let’s take rental out of it. Shoot the middle at 3k.
$3000/team fee
- Entry fee and weekend pit pass
$695 + $65 = $760
- Consumables – fuel, oil, chains, sprockets, etc.
$300
- Let’s say you drove your own equipment down and back.
$500 in gas
- Finally, most guys have an A and B engine, both refreshed for each event. $700-$1000 per engine. If you rent, the price is similar.
$2000/engines.
Total using your own chassis, bringing your own friend as a mechanic, $9,235.
And that’s the number that gets ranked up against an MX5 Cup, Spec Miata, F4, USF Junior, and TransAm TA2 weekend.
Add a mechanic at $300/day + travel for 6 days of work, you’re talking an additional $2500 if he stays in your room with you, or $3250 if he doesn’t.
And now we’ve inched above the $12,500 marker.
This was also for KA. If you’re running X30 or Shifter, add 3-4 more sets of tires. Those guys ran between 8-10 sets over the weekend.
Now, sure, that’s a lot of laps. 5 Days of driving. 4-5 sessions per day. In a car series you’re on track 4-6 times per weekend MAX.
But that’s not what the focus on when it comes to value. People are justifying the cost on the overall experience, level of competition, and potential to recoup that investment down the line. Whether that’s weekend winnings, championship winnings, or the potential to move up into a sponsored drive in some form later on.
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What’s so frustrating about all of this, is that almost all of our costs in that breakdown that come close to the car budgets are variable.
We don’t need to burn through that many sets of tires. That many hotel nights. That many days of a mechanic or team. And our crash damage bills are way lower than if you were to wad up a racecar.
It wasn’t too long ago that our weekends were half of that cost.
In 2014, I ran my first ever USPKS event in Yamaha Junior. The equivalent to KA Junior now. Here’s what I remember in terms of costs.
- 3 Day weekend. No thursday practice or wednesday practice.
- 2 total sets of tires. 1 set to use midway through Friday practice, 1 for both racedays. $500
- 3 nights of hotel. We drove home Sunday night. We stayed at the days inn. $70/night x 3 at $225 with tax.
- Pitted on our own. Pit spot for a 30x10 space was maybe $50.
- Entry fee was $350. Can’t remember if driver pit pass was included or not. Assuming not, $130 in pit passes for me and my dad.
- Engine rebuild was $750 before the event.
I qualified 5th one day, I think 9th the other. Broke a chain and bent a tie rod over the course of the weekend. Call it high for $100 on consumables.
DNFed on Sunday, finished 7th (?) on Saturday. Sunday crashed out running 5th on a red flag restart out of a field of 27.
In total:
- $500 in tires
- $100 in consumables
- $225 in hotel
- $350 in entry
- $130 in pit passes
- $750 in engine rebuild
- $50 pit spot
- $200 in gas for our old 1994 jeep grand cherokee to pull our 8x12 trailer.
Total: $2,305.
Came back and podiumed in Senior the next year at the same weekend with a small team fee to help at around $900
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In 2017, in the first KA Season statesside, I think the entry went up to maybe $400. Still no Thursday practice then.
Used dumpster tires for Friday practice and hovered the Top 5.
Single engine, pitted on our own as a sponsored guy for a small team where all I had to pay was some mileage.
$250 for tires
$400 for entry
$250 more or less for the hotel
Approx cost of $350 as I ran the engine the following race before doing a rebuild for $700
$200 in gas
$50-$100 pit spot roughly
$130 in pit passes
Total $1680.
Finished 5th Saturday and 7th Sunday out of 27-30 in KA Senior.
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What you are not accounting for is the thousands of dollars you spent to gather the knowledge and skill to do that on your own. You and I are not the people paying these prices.
Rambling with all these, but as I’m sure anyone can tell it bothers me.
F1’s towed the line tremendously to bring growth to racing worldwide and especially stateside.
The pandemic saved people money and the first things people could do were outdoor sports. That gave us a major boost as well.
Our numbers, in my opinion, should be double what they are now. At every level. But, as a whole all costs have gone up tremendously, and the perceptive cost to compete has gone up. I don’t think a single parent believes they can show up as a privateer at a national race and have a fighting shot of finishing anywhere up front. In any class. I know my dad wishes we could’ve gone with one when I was younger and we shoestrung it.
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This is my favorite part of your whole breakdown, and a key to success for the club or casual regional racer. Find a national event near you and harvest their “dead” practice tires. Many sets will have plenty of life left in them, and you can build an inventory of practice tires to cover your needs for the entire year.
As you process it IS important to spring for new practice tires from time to time in order to conduct a proper qualy simulation.
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I agree with what you’re saying here for most.
However, in my background to that point, I’d like to argue that we spent less and raced less than most.
In 2013, we raced around 10 times at our local club, and the final 6 races of 2012. First in clone junior, replaced now by 206, and second in Yamaha. Learned a little, but honestly, not a ton. Never even podiumed in clone junior. We bought all of 2 sets of tires. We were so clueless.
That 2014 national was the 3rd I ever ran. I ran 2013 Daytona in December with the help of a friend, and 2013 WKA Mooresville on our own in a 4-cycle chassis that was awful. In both cases I think the weekend spend was still under $2500.
So yeah, maybe, I could’ve bypassed those two primary weekends and put the $5k towards a team. But my driving would’ve probably not been fully there.
My ‘seat of the pants’ feel never fully developed. I’d argue I’m still way behind my peers with similar resumes to me in that regard. Just learned a ton on GoPro and data. I’d always be really, really slow at the start of a race weekend.
The rest of our racing calendar:
2014
- 3 x USPKS rounds – Mooresville, MRP, Pittsburgh
- 1 x Mooresville Club Race
2015 - 1 x USPKS Mooresville start in Yamaha Senior – only ever Yamaha Senior race
- 2 x Club Races at Mooresville in X30 Senior
2016 - 1 x Club Race at Mooresville in X30 Senior
- 1 x USPKS Mooresville X30 Senior
2017 - 3 x USPKS KA Senior starts – Mooresville, Pittsburgh, New Castle – Top 5 to Top 10 at each, 1 podium
2018 - 2.x SKUSA Pro Tour starts in X30 – awful results, moved up a bit early, no testing, struggled. 20th out of 40 at NOLA, 25th-30th out of 70 at New Castle
2019 - 3 x USPKS Starts in X30 – 3rd, 9th with a pushback, 11th, DNF, 11th, DNF – Ocala // Mooresville // New Castle in that order
- 1 x SKUSA SummerNats start – awful, 25th-30th or something out of 60 on a kart I was unfamiliar with
and that pretty much wrapped it.
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Also, and this again, is where a lot of my imposter syndrome comes from:
From 2016 onwards I got things discounted to eventually fully covered off when it came to my bill due to a mix of networking / relationships I made through traveling around announcing and then coaching locally. In 2018, my SKUSA starts had no chassis rental or team fee to run with KartSport thanks to my job at AMR Homestead-Miami Motorplex. In 2019, it was a pseudo-team with 3 kids I coached that covered the X30 bill. It was also the first year I ever ran on a brand new chassis.
My results both before and at those events far from warranted anyone covering my bills. Got very, VERY lucky.
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I know this is not the topic of this thread, but man this highlights the discrepancy between “national” and “local”. The budgets for 1 weekend listed here are more than my entire club season budget (14 races).
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My dad estimates we spent in the ballpark of $40,000 from 2012 to 2017 on my racing.
And again, we definitely cut corners that hindered performance both tested and raced significantly less than most.
I know sometimes I’ll get parents that come up to me and tell me that whenever I talk about costs of our sport I grossly underestimate them. But part of that comes from how we did things. Which I think the best way to describe us was a club racer trying to disguise myself as a national racer.
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It’s awful.
I’m really excited for what Chris Kardashian is going to do with the Route 66 Sprint Series this year. This weekend for the Texas Sprint Racing Series practice won’t start until 10AM Friday and you can’t even move-in until Thursday. The format also has 3 practices on Saturday and a single set of tires for all classes from Qualy on.
There’s also about a 50-50 split of teams to privateers at the TSRS shows and Route 66 shows.
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We need a blog/thread on how to be competitive at the regional/national level while maintaining a budget. I know we got tons of stories of taking 5 karts in a 6x12 trailer to Charlotte for Spring Nats or travelling around following Buckeye Karting Challenge while my son and I slept in our trailer every night.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
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For one season for me locally, is about $5500 for ten races. That is including travel to and from, food, gas/oil, tires, club membership, race day fees, top end rebuild, and misc parts. so yeah about half of what one weekend costs for national.
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Thats quite literally how every race is in the UK. Clubs normally practice fri and sat, race sunday. Nationals used to be like that but i havent paid attention to what they are doing now.
And Padholder Supercup in the PNW runs practice friday then two race days. Same set of tires for both days.
As you’ve sort of alluded to, there’s plenty of teams who are happy to subsidise one driver by overcharging others and thats true everywhere. Even in euros i was subsidised by a driver who went onto be an indycar driver (i only found out because i was told i had to be nice to them even though they were a bit a dick at times).
I’m not sure I buy the distance argument. There will always be teams who travel across, but the populations centers like the North East and West Coast should be able to support very healthy karting. But they don’t. And thats a challenge karting enthusiasts have been dealing with world wide. Theres a good chance (in my mind) that karting has just ticked over what most people consider acceptable discretiony spend. With increasing costs of living and not equivalent wage increases i think we’re seeing that the typical club racer budget is outside the realms of most in the large population centers but achievable in the cheaper to live places. So we see lots of poorly supported clubs in low population areas (not enough people near by) and poorly supported clubs in high population areas (not enough expendable income to race).
I’ll respectfully disagree with the MX5 numbers. Going rate is $30K a weekend for a front running operation. It’s a $300K season and maybe one guy comes out ahead on purse. You can do it for $120-150K if you own the car, use used tires a lot in practice and test very little. Still better than just about any other road racing series, but the only people with positive cash flow in the series are the teams realistically speaking. Spec MX5 and Spec Miata are cheaper for sure but they are the equivalent of club or regional karting so you have to compare the costs involved to that level of karting, not top level national budgets.
Nobody should ever go to a competitive semi-pro series in cars because it’s cheaper than karting at a high level. If you want to spend less money and race in great fields, exercise better self control in karting. If you just want to race cars, go race cars because you want to. It’s not as competitive. It’s not as exciting. It’s not cheaper. And frankly it’s just not as cool unless your idea of fun is to sit around all day to go on track once or twice. But don’t do it to save money.
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I agree fully with ya. And I know you’ve got as much love for our sport as I do. But I’d be willing to bet you’ve got a lot more karting lifers in the 50k and under annual budget than in the 50k-150k budgets being spent stateside now. And like it or not, that’s where top karting series are now competing and being compared against top level car series. The closer the budgets get, the more drivers they’ll ‘lose’.
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Ninety five percent of lifers are sub $50K budgets. I’d be willing to bet eighty percent are sub $10K even. We all spend a lot of time giving that top 5% a lot of bandwidth. Lol But our bread and butter is the lifers you mentioned!
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Club driver budget, 12 practice days and 8 races:
$3500 in LO206
$6500 in KA100
$8000 in X30 or shifter
Local/regional driver budget, 25 practice days, 10 club races, 5 regional race weekends
$8000 in LO206 if there is a series that’s really “regional” around you
$20000 in KA100, X30, or shifter in a “half-the-US” series
Includes towing costs with a car you already have.