The Canadian Motorsport Academy has been launched to develop Canadian motorsport talent and I have all the details in this week’s Driver Development Roundup.
Additionally, this week, you’ll discover insights into the Class of 2024 at the Motorsport UK Academy, insights into the Accelerate Pride program, and the significance of assembling a team to drive your motorsport aspirations forward. Furthermore, I reintroduce the Driver Spotlight, featuring two drivers whose stories I trust will ignite inspiration within you.
All this and more in this week’s edition of the Driver Development Roundup on Motorsport Prospects. Its news aspiring racers can use.
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The Canadian Motorsport Academy (CMA) has been launched with the goal to not only build the world’s most successful motorsport Academy, but one that inspires and empowers all ages, genders, and abilities, to be a part of motorsport on equal terms. Its members are taught all aspects of their chosen profession in motorsports – not just including Drivers, but Engineers, Mechanics, Press Representatives, Marketing Professionals and Team Managers.
At this time, the programs main focus is on providing young drivers with the support required to make it to the highest echelons of motorsport. The Academy is focused on identifying, educating, mentoring, and coaching young racing drivers and providing them with a defined and supported pathway from Karting into professional GT racing.
To be considered for an opportunity to become an Academy Member, drivers must first Register. Once an application has been received, which includes a personal video presentation, potential candidates will be invited to attend an in person or Zoom call with our Selection Committee, to share with the committee “Why They Feel They Should Be Considered for a Position as an Academy Member”.
Through their short video candidates will be asked to share details about their racing activities and their goals for the future in racing and life. These videos will be reviewed by the CMA Selection Committee and will form a large part of the committee’s selection criteria.
Through their application, drivers must demonstrate why they are deserving of a place in CMA, through their individual driving performance results, their passion for the sport, their focus and drive to succeed, and most importantly their values and philosophies in life.
They must also demonstrate proper grades with their schooling (if applicable ) and have demonstrated sportsmanship and leadership in all that they do. Candidates must also be Canadian citizens or hold landed immigrant status.
Full details on the Canadian Motorsport Academy can be found at their website https://canadianmotorsportacademy.com/.
Staying in the UK, the 2024 Motorsport UK Academy line-up has been confirmed. Thirty-one newly selected drivers and co-drivers join 37 returning drivers for the Team UK, Futures and Co-Driver programs.
Team UK is a national squad of elite competitors selected to receive a bespoke one-to-one performance program as they compete in the sport’s top series. The line-up will include FIA World Rallycross hotshot Patrick O’Donovan, who has been part of the Academy since 2020, GT driver and 2022 Futures graduate Adam Smalley, GB3 champion Callum Voisin, 2022 Co-Driver graduate Cameron Fair, FIA F2 driver Taylor Barnard and F1 Academy racer Abbi Pulling.
The Futures squad will be bolstered by new recruits including British F4 runner up Will Macintyre and karting champion Freddie Slater, who join endurance racer Daryl De Leon, Marcus Littlewood, Scott Sumpton, Jodie Sloss, Joe Warhurst and Will Orton.
The co-driver group will continue to benefit from support from rally champions, M-Sport, who will provide opportunities to join the team at select WRC rounds to gain insight into how a team operates at the top level. New selections for this cohort are Bonnie Papper, Grace Pedley, Owen Paterson, Ifan Devine, Robbie Sandford and Harry Walshaw, who join returning graduates Emily Easton-Page, Emma Clarke and Harry Stubbs.
All new cohorts will be supported across four key development areas; technical/tactical, physical, mental and social/commercial. Each discipline will be led by coaching staff and a network of expert practitioners and motorsport team contacts to provide advice, development and industry insight to young, talented drivers and co-drivers.
The first program training camps will begin in March.
More Than Equal is the initiative dedicated to addressing the lack of female representation in motorsport by nurturing and unearthing not only the next wave of female racing talent, but the first female Formula 1 World Champion.
To aid the initiative in its goal, More Than Equal has set up a one-of-a-kind female driver development program to guide the next generation of women racers. Alpine Formula 1 Development Driver and Reserve and Development Driver for the Mahindra Formula E team Jordan King has been assigned as one of the program’s coaches and he spoke to Motorsport Week about his role.
“The thing with motorsport is a big limiting factor always comes down to finances and as with things like coaching and mentoring, development away from the track falls second most of the time to the budget constraints. If you’re trying hard to get a budget together, to go racing, you’re not gonna spend the extra money on the development. So it becomes a bit counterintuitive, trying to save money, but also listening to your development. I never had a one-to-one coach that was my personal coach, but some of the teams I was in had a coach or the engineers would help you and everything. So there was a level of developing and development there, but not a massive amount. And there was always a large program around in Motorsport UK, which was MSA, had a team UK program, the BRDC had the Rising Stars and then the Superstars program. There was an FIA program back in the day that I was involved with. So there’s always been things around, and I suppose this becomes something for a driver, they don’t have to worry about it, we can do everything for them, that kind of public constraint can go away, and because we’re independent we can take the best of all the worlds, put it into one place, and really have some really good people, some really good development, and hopefully have a really good programme by the end of it.”
British indoor karting organization TeamSport is doing its bit to further female representation in motorsport and together with Motorsport UK and F1 Academy, has continued running F1 Academy Discover Your Drive UK, a nationwide program to identify and develop the next generation of female karters.
Open to girls aged 8-12, TeamSport piloted the scheme across six venues in 2023 and saw a 265% increase in females participating in the British Indoor Karting Championships as a result.
The collaboration continues in 2024 with TeamSport Instructors using Discover Your Drive Days to identify talent to join the Discover Your Drive Race Academy – and a taster day was recently run on Monday, February 12.
“We teamed up with F1 Academy and Motorsport UK to provide the facilities and help promote the scheme to help young females, aged 8-12 to get into motorsport,” a TeamSport representative told Motorsport Week. “We train the young girls, provide the trainers and facilities, and run the programmes. It’s our dream to see more females in motorsport and one day even in Formula One. We’re currently in our second cohort and just ran some taster sessions for young girls across the country (Feb 12),” the TeamSport spokesperson said. “Proper sessions then start end of Feb and each racer has 5 sessions with our qualified instructors and hopefully it’s the start of some wonderful journeys for them!”
Speaking of Discover Your Drive UK, Motorsport UK’s Revolution Magazine caught up with Rosa Dakin, program manager of Discover Your Drive, to discus this national program offering a gateway to motorsport for young girls.
“We have also acknowledged the need for the girls to be supported beyond the Discover Your Drive Race Academy with the creation of the Discover Your Drive Race League sessions that will give the girls the opportunity to practice against mixed ability and gender, to develop their race craft.”
In the video above, Enzo Mucci discusses the importance of building a team to help you achieve your motorsport goals. “People are key. Build your own team of people to help you win.”
If you are looking to build your team, the Motorsport Prospects Directory is a good place to start.
Motorsport UK proudly supported Accelerate Pride at the British Motor Museum on Friday 2 February, 2024.
Organized by Racing Pride, the movement to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion throughout the motorsport world and its associated industries, Accelerate Pride was the first opportunity for brands to come together in a single space to share best practices and discuss collaborations within the LGBTQ+ community.
Accelerate Pride assembled stakeholders from across both the motorsport and automotive worlds, including Red Bull Racing, Aston Martin Lagonda, Aston Martin F1 Team and Team BRIT – amongst many others.
Three panels of influential speakers were hosted over the course of the day. Motorsport UK’s Head of Sustainability, Jessica Runicles, sat on one panel titled ‘LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Motorsport: Creating Opportunities For All’, alongside karter Jess Alexander, Laila Fadli Dokkali, MSc Motorsport Scholar at the Royal Academy of Engineering & Mission 44 ambassador, Team BRIT racer Anji Silva-Vadgama and Will Jones from Sheffield Formula Racing.
Jessica and her fellow speakers underscored the importance of working with the motorsport community to understand critical topics, plus the value of allyship, understanding and leaving a tangible legacy for others to follow. Jessica in particular discussed the need for the governing body to create policies to create behavioural and cultural change within the UK motorsport landscape.
Jessica Runicles commented: “At Motorsport UK we understand the need to represent what is happening in the community and to create policies that give a voice and a platform to people who often feel under-represented. We work very closely with Racing Pride to understand what matters and how to then put into a framework that can be used to guide, educate and also hold people to account when needed. We were pleased to support Accelerate Pride to learn from other companies and also share experiences.”
For more on Motorsport UK’s activities within the LGBTQ+ community, please visit our EDI pages here: Best of Behaviours – Motorsport UK
United Autosports team boss Richard Dean told Motorsport Week about his impressions of the GT driver market, having learnt about it swiftly in light of their new LMGT3 campaign for the 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship.
“We’re so focused on our own series, and GT – in terms of [the] driver market – is very different, and there are an awful lot more opportunities for drivers, a lot more choices. They can do IMSA, they can do GT World Challenge. You don’t have to do Le Mans 24 Hours. [The] Spa 24 Hours is an amazing race – it’s the GT drivers’ equivalent to it. So it’s a very different market, which I would have liked to have had 6, 8, 12 months lead time to figure out, but we’ve had 2 months.”
Driver Snapshots
Learning from the experience of others is key to succeeding in any walk of life and racing is no different. In Driver Snapshots, I feature the experiences of various drivers where you can get some perspective on what they have gone through (and continue to go through) as they work to make their motorsport careers happen. I hope you can take some lessons from these experiences and apply them to your own motorsport careers.
Connor Zilisch
Ahead of his IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship debut during last month’s 24 Hours of Daytona, 17-year-old Connor Zilisch spoke to Motorsport Week about his new, exciting endeavor into endurance racing.
“Just broadening my skillset and driving different cars is a big thing for me as I’m learning. I’m still really young and have a long career ahead of me… I feel like stepping into something that will make me uncomfortable is going to help me in the long run. That’s part of the mindset I’m taking into this season – learning as much as I can, trying to be a sponge and soak everything up.”
Noah Cosby
In the video above, Team BRIT introduce their newest driver, 18-year-old Noah Cosby from Heathencote, Northamptonshire. Watch Noah’s story, starting at just 5 years old where he already had a passion for motocross, to now, driving for Team BRIT – competing in the Citroen C1 series
Author: Mark Boudreau
Mark is the publisher of Motorsport Prospects. As a lawyer, he applies his legal background and research skills to assist race drivers by showcasing the resources they need to make their motorsport careers happen.
