Just for the sake of discussion… in every other sport, “pro” means there is some kind of payment involved. Why is karting/motorsports different. Or is it?
My brain hurts now. I’m gonna go drive a virtual indy car around a circle with banked corners and let the Stig do the talking.
Was a bit late to this after a very busy weekend.
Karting as a sport – I feel – is always fighting for legitimacy more than any other discipline of racing.
Nobody bats an eye when SCCA calls F4 a ‘Pro Series’, or Mazda MX-5 Cup, or Trans-Am, or even F1600. Yet in pretty much all of those series, everyone is paying to play. Sure, there’s cash payouts in either each race weekend or the championship, or both, but it’s never enough to profit. At best the champ breaks even.
There is a lot of the karting team leader model in those series – where drivers either get a discount or sometimes even paid to drive to be a coach and data point for paying customers with the team. Or to attract those customers. And in rare instances, a driver gets to be a jockey for a really rich guy who just wants to win races.
With that said, pro in my opinion, is a mix of
- Cash payouts – and substantial ones at that
- Adults running, even if the category starts below the age of 18, i.e. Senior Classes
- Strength of field
- Speed / Top of the Pyramid
Many look down on the single-make engine classes as non-pro, such as X30, but at the end of the day, it really isn’t that deep. Yes, there’s no manufacturer battle in the engine side, but if it’s the fastest thing we’ve got and top of our single-speed pyramid, why not call it pro.
If there’s a better word to be used to describe the top-tier classes, and maybe the proper term is top-tier instead of pro, then I’m all for it. But it’s silly for us karters to knock our own classes down a peg for using the term pro and then watch someone race Miatas at the SCCA Runoffs and say that’s ‘Pro Racing’.
As for KA, it’s treated as the Semi-Pro class by default due to being slower than X30 / OKN at first, and then that snowballs / multiplies as you add payouts to the X30 classes, and drivers and teams out of respect for the sport, keep their best guys out of it.
New for this year at SKUSA and Stars with the updated format will be a complete ban of drivers double-dipping in the pro classes and non-pro classes. On the surface it’s just for the benefit of extra seat time. But for the sport wholistically it should help define our ladder a bit better, and open the door for new drivers to prove themselves in a class that’s meant to be less expensive to compete for wins.
And as for this, RPG and a few teams do run a house guy in KA. For 2024 and the end of 2023, RPG has Nate Cicero. In 2022, it was Cedrik Lupien. Brandon Lemke does his own team in KA even though he’s a top-level driver, Braden Eves would get run in KA for MPG Customers, and so on.
But if you compare the list of an X30 grid to a KA grid, it’s not even close to equal on driver talent at SKUSA / USPKS. So to me, that, along with having a payout, and then going faster, it’s a level above.
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If SKUSA hosted a OK class one year and had a few ‘works’ drivers, does X30 maintain is ‘Pro’ status? Just a question.
I think your point about cash-payouts is right. I think an organiser using the term ‘Pro’ should definitely be offering cash prizes to warrant such a title.
Personally I am not really fussed by the Pro nomenclature. I am more pedantic about the incorrect use of World and European Champions which is specifically legislated against, but not actually enforced.
I think unfortunately the term ‘pro’ has largely lost its legitimacy in Motorsport. Even at the IndyCar level or F1 more than half the grid is paying to play. To me, in any sport, that isn’t being a pro.
Because of that, I don’t use cash payouts as a measure of professionalism in my estimation of motorsport disciplines and legitimacy. Going faster and it being more ‘elite’ seems like a more logical delineation to me than who pays what and to whom.
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Absolutely. X30 just falls into that spot by default of being the fastest single-speed option. In my opinion, we don’t have enough drivers for three levels though. That’s why the Stars guys just did OK-N and KA100. We hardly have enough drivers to do two Junior classes now and most double-dip anyway.
**To be fair, if we raced half as often as we did nationally, we could probably fill three skill level groups.
That’s a fair analysis for sure. Pro by the textbook definition means being paid to do something so to me that’s the first start to the cash argument.
Also, cash payouts – at least at the moment – are structured solely off of the take from the promoter when it comes to gate fees and entry fees of drivers and immediate family and team employees, since we don’t currently have an in-person fanbase. I think we could get one in the future based on the direction we’re headed, and I think very soon the streams will become profitable to the point that Promoters will have extra money from them to put into purses also.
But for now, that’s not the case. And so you’re basically taking money from everyone and giving it to the top guys in the class. And in my eyes, that makes the class a bit of a ‘gong show’, where if you keep spending money but running in the back, you’ll eventually run out of money, quit, or quit because you’ve run out of money. So naturally, only the fastest and best survive because they win enough to keep going.
For example, see the new Pro Tour Pro Class Purse structure below:
PRO CLASS CHAMPIONSHIP PRIZES
A staggering $130,320 prize package has been developed for our two Pro classes. The top 10 finishers in the 2024 Championship will receive the following.
TOTAL PRIZE PACKAGE VALUE Cash Prize 2025 Pro Tour Entry/Tires SuperNats 27 Entry/Tires 1st $15,062 $10,000 $3,567 $1,495 2nd $10,062 $5,000 $3,567 $1,495 3rd $6,567 $3,000 $3,567 4th $5,567 $2,000 $3,567 5th $5,067 $1,500 $3,567 6th $4,567 $1,000 $3,567 7th $4,567 $1,000 $3,567 8th $4,567 $1,000 $3,567 9th $4,567 $1,000 $3,567 10th $4,567 $1,000 $3,567 PRO CLASS PODIUM PRIZES*
The top 3 finishers in the Sunday Finals will receive the following CASH prizes.
- 1st - $5000
- 2nd - $2500
- 3rd - $1000
This amounts to a $7,500 cash purse per class, per event, and a total of $51,000 for the season!
I know of multiple drivers who have gotten paid or heavily sponsored rides from teams to run this based on a revenue share of the purse. Not to mention there’s basically a scaled down version of Indycar’s Leader’s Circle fund where the Top 10 are going to have entry and race tires for the 2025 season in their pocket to shop around, ideally keeping them in the seat for the following year.
To do this massive purse, SKUSA is slightly increasing the fees for these classes, and then dipping into their own pocket because the math won’t perfectly add up.
USPKS also has always had a beefy per race cash package and a good contingency championship fund. But again, being top-heavy and purse racing means only the guys at the front make back what they put in and can continue easier.
That’s interesting. In some ways that does legitimize the ‘top level’ classes of the sport nationally. Conversely, I can’t help but feel that it’s a great example of the rich getting richer when it comes to who receives the payouts. Then again, that isn’t at all unique to karting or racing. To the victor go the spoils.
I think it’s really tricky to get it right in karting because so much of the engaged user base thinks they have to spend like a pro at the regional level, and that’s fed to them by series, tent teams, and other competitors. So in a way it muddies the waters as to what sets a ‘true’ pro apart from those that are attempting to be them, look like them, act like them, etc.
So in a weird way, because I think the sport is at such a small scale, it’s tricky to see a clear delimitation between sportsman and pro, even at the pro tour level.
I think you’re bang on here. I’m hoping that with the half and half format for Stars and SKUSA through the weekend this year will help change that a bit. The leading 125cc single speed and Shifter classes will get less track time, more tv time, more purse money, and a slightly higher entry fee than everyone else. They’ll also run at prime time, which based on our data is 3-5 PM on Sundays. And the format has all support classes from 8am-3pm more or less, and the pros from 3-5PM Friday - Sunday. Stars will have a slightly different version as they are going to qualify Friday to end closer to 2PM overall on Sunday.
This is the other thing, and a great point. We need to a better job at being louder than the noise of others in terms of defining what is what in the sport. And by louder, I mean reaching more people consistently than anyone else. You can’t make everyone agree, but you can at least be heard by everyone. That’s definitely happening more and more now in my eyes just based off the DMs and comments we receive at Kart Chaser. Lots of new club and regional racers starting to get a good feel for what the sport is and it’s levels.
And being louder shouldn’t be just pushing the national levels above, but also as mentioned earlier in this thread, driving home the affordability and more casual nature of club and regional racing as much as possible. We’ll be streaming more events this year, doing extra content and vlogs of races as well at the lower levels, and I want to drive home that point as much as I can of how relatable, significantly more affordable, and relatively speaking lower stress it is to race at a club weekend than a USPKS or SKUSA Pro Tour.
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Just out of curiosity @XanderClements, do you have any thoughts on how KCs approach to karting differs from Flo Sports’ coverage of USAC, drag racing, and grassroots oval racing?
In the simplest of terms, I feel like Flo does a great job of just exposing what grassroots racing already is.
I’d say they’re similar to KC with the High Limit Sprint Car Series headed by Brad Sweet and Kyle Larson, along with sponsoring Larson.
But outside of that, they’re strictly a streaming corp. I see us as a much more ingrained entity in the karting industry, because as it stands it’s not big enough and not structured for us to just be a media company. I also think in general karting as a load of untapped potential that’s within reach.
But there’s more similarities than comparisons.
Just as we beef up coverage for marquee events, Flo does as well for things like the Chili Bowl, but then also dial down coverage for smaller races that do a couple of things
- give your team enough work to employ them full time
- act as a farm system or minor league program for staff to train at before going to marquee shows
- add content to your library to keep viewers enticed monthly
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