Readers may well be familiar with the British television show Top Gear, which has taken various forms over the years. Currently enjoying something of a newfound maturity, the show recently looked at whether talented amateur racing drivers could perform well at high levels of motorsport.
Motorsport is notoriously hard to get into, and raw talent is not enough. You have to have an extensive bankroll just to get on a low-cost grid. It also helps if you already know someone who has connections and/ or experience in order to be exposed to the opportunities that will lead to the top. The prevalence of second - and third - generation drivers reaching Formula 1, sometimes at the expense of more talented rivals, speaks to this trend. Two Villeneuves, Hills, Piquets, Rosbergs, Andrettis and Sennas, as well as three Schumachers (two generations) and four Fittipaldis (three generations), have made F1 starts. Spoiler alert: None of the second or third generation racers has yet surpassed the achievements of the first.
So, in an effort to uncover the extent of this potential untapped talent, Top Gear invited 13 young amateurs to a track test. All had some experience of competitive driving or karting. Two drivers, both in their early 20s, were then selected and fully embedded within a professional race team, receiving the same coaching and experiences thatuld usually be reserved for those with the ‘right’ connections or bank balance. They underwent training in a Mazda MX5 at an open track day and took written exams to participate in the races they would enter later in the experiment.
At the half-way point, around a month in, the drivers entered a weekend of MX5 races at the narrow and twisty Cadwell Park track. Having never raced a car on tarmac before, both acquitted themselves well, making up places and mixing it with more experienced rivals. Most importantly, neither crashed or caused any other headaches for the team.
The next challenge was considerably more difficult: racing a McLaren 570S GT4 car in the GT Cup. A test session showed that this was quite a step up. The GT4 has a 3.8-litre engine that generates 562bhp, reaches 100km/hr in 3.4 seconds and has a top speed of 320km/hr. Even after extensive simulator time and physical training, one of the drivers nearly vomited in his helmet, just from the strength of the brakes. However, his confidence soon grew and both were able to string together a series of representative laps. They seemed to be on track.
Just eight weeks after the initial selection day, the pair raced the GT4 at Donington Park in a round of the GT Cup Championship. This is around two thirds of the way up the UK motorsport ladder and not somewhere that drivers without significant backing normally reach. Both drivers took turns to set practice and qualifying times. During the race, they would not only have to keep it ‘on the black stuff,’ but also negotiate a tricky driver change at the half way point.
The race went about as well as the programme makers could have hoped. The first driver made up two positions and avoided a spinning rival. The second negotiated the resulting safety car restart to come home seventh in class. Their smiles were from ear to ear at a job done well. They had surpassed expectations, not only in terms of raw skill, but in their willingness to learn, adapt and take on feedback. Such has been their success that one is now in discussion with Lewis Hamilton’s Misson 44 project, which aims to expand opportunities for overlooked young people within education, training and employment. The other has been taken on as a mechanical apprentice at Hamilton’s F1 rivals Red Bull.
Of course, by being selected for the programme, these two drivers have also been given opportunities that were not available to their peers, but they have grasped them fully. What the 11 other candidates may have done, not to mention thousands like them, is of course unknown. However, the Top Gear team’s fundamental point is that, given the chance, there is plenty of untapped talent out there waiting to be developed.
More widely, the experiment highlights that there may be advantages for businesses to look beyond the obvious when it comes to recruitment and training. For example, data analysts are becoming as valuable to the gypsum and insulation sectors as plant operators. If that seems too dramatic, it might be valuable to expose existing staff to novel experiences within the business and see how they fare. There may be untapped opportunities to tailor roles to make the best of a given workforce, particularly as older employees retire. Finally, in an ever-changing industrial landscape, it would be unwise to write off people that have only limited experience. They too might be able to learn the job in eight weeks and surpass all expectations.
