• Sport

'Passionate' plan for Africa catches MBS's eye

• 11 Hours Ago

In WORR Motorsport's pursuit of becoming the first African F1 team, it has earned the attention of the FIA's president Mohammed Ben Sulayem at the African Panel at the FIA's Global Motorsport and Mobility Conference in Macau.

"By creating accessible and structured pathways into the sport, we are giving more young people the opportunity to discover motorsport, develop their skills and pursue their ambitions. Programmes like this are vital to growing participation and nurturing future talent," Sulayem said about the Karting Africa programme.

The programme provides its own chassis and standardised equipment to control costs with the aim of developing young drivers in areas where permanent racing infrastructure does not exist. This programme is designed to use temporary tracks and street circuits instead.

"WORR is no longer a South African race team. It is now an African development partner," WORR founder Wesleigh Orr said after the Academy was recently implemented in Botswana. 

While WORR Motorsport remains set on their goal to become the first African Formula 1 team, their continental Karting Africa programme aims to develop young drivers at grassroots level in order to produce an African F1 driver.

“We’ve got to move fast, because a racing driver’s career is so short. At 15, you already need to be moving to Formula – you need to be recognised very young, so we don’t have time to waste. Drivers at six or seven years old – we need to move now to give them the opportunity to see a true African driver in Formula 1 in the next five to ten years,” Orr said at the conference.

TIMELINE

While the Karting Africa programme at present is a robust, scrappy plan with a make-do approach, their eventual mission is to improve motorsport development capacity and infrastructure across the continent.

“The short-term goal right now is to go into every country and start digging for the ones that have got no grassroots motorsport at all and put down training academies. We're going to move with our truck and our team and do street tracks if they don't have any infrastructure.

"And if they do have tracks, we're going to work hard at improving what they already have. Then in the countries that are already established in motorsport, we want to create national series down,” Orr shared at the Macau conference that drew 450 senior delegates from 149 countries.

According to Orr, the establishment of national series will serve a two-fold purpose – it is expected to set off a development loop and serve the wider missions of both Karting Africa and WORR by enabling a continental series. 

“We want to empower them with the national series and make sure that we can again in turn improve their infrastructure and improve their knowledge so we can start developing the talent locally. The midterm goal is something that I'm super passionate about, and that is the Pan–African Series and the FIA tracks.

"The Pan-African Series is to unite African motorsport at the grassroots level. If we can get everyone to stand together, which we are busy doing, we'll have one of the greatest Pan-African Series in terms of a series that can compete with a European-style series,” Orr shared.

RACING ECOSYSTEM

In the long term, WORR has set its sights on creating a complete, self-sufficient racing ecosystem on the African continent that can rival that already established in Europe and, as such, empower more Africans to climb the rungs of the sport.

“The problem we have, and I struggled with in my own career, is you have to leave home to develop. And you know, we have our own traditions, we have our own love of our continent. We deserve a chance within our own continent to stay at home, stay with our families or have a two- or three-hour flight for us to leave home to stay in another country.

"It's difficult for athletes. So I think within the next two to five years, as a team, we're going to get the grassroots level series running efficiently. We're going to put a passionate program together, and we already have testimony of some great drivers that we've been working with as well.”

– irene-mari@nmh-hub.com.na