Most people hear “karting” and picture a birthday party at an indoor track. What my son Ethan does bears almost no resemblance to that.
Ethan is 14, from Aldridge, Walsall, and races in Junior Rotax — widely regarded as the toughest karting class in the UK. Last weekend he was at PF International in Lincolnshire for Round 5 of the Trent Valley Kart Championship, alongside 64 other drivers, on a circuit that most people in the sport will tell you is the hardest in the country.
To put the standard in perspective: the difference between first place and 65th at PFI can be as little as three to five tenths of a second per lap. Half a second, across the whole field. There is nowhere to hide.
Ethan is one of the youngest drivers on that grid and only eight months into the class. Many of the drivers he’s racing are in their second or third season.
Saturday was testing and qualifying, and it started brilliantly. Ethan was fifth quickest in the opening session and the kart felt good.
Then, over the next three or four sessions, the pace simply disappeared. He was losing three to five tenths a lap and neither of us could work out why. In a sport this tight, that’s the difference between the front and the back.
Qualifying is scored on your best three-lap average across a five-minute session, and it went against him. He got held up behind slower drivers on his final lap, then picked up a nose cone penalty which deletes your fastest lap. He qualified 22nd on the road.
Back at the awning that evening, we found the answer: a hairline crack in the chassis, just below the clutch drum.
We talked it through over dinner, as we always do — the good, the bad, confidence, focus, and a plan for race day. He went to bed determined rather than deflated. That, I’ve learned, is the whole game at this level.
Sunday brought two heats and the A Final.
Heat 1 — started 29th, finished 17th. Heat 2 — started 29th, finished 15th.
That was 26 overtakes across two eight-minute races, and enough to put him into the A Final in 30th place out of 65. Making the A Final at PFI is always the first goal of the weekend, and after Saturday it felt like a proper result.
The A Final — he started 30th and simply went to work. Lap after lap he found a way past, climbing all the way to 16th with two laps remaining, running top-five pace. Two more moves and he’d have been inside the top 15 of the best junior drivers in Britain.
Then another driver hit him from behind, knocked him off course and dropped him down the order. He finished 23rd.
Around 40 overtakes across three races in a single day. Not the result we wanted on paper — but anyone standing at that fence saw a driver who belongs at the sharp end of that field.
I’ve watched Ethan race for years. This was the best weekend I’ve seen from him, and I suspect we’ll look back on it as a turning point.
Ethan Guest Racing is not a factory team. There’s no wealthy backer behind it. It’s a family from Walsall doing this the hard way, funded almost entirely by local businesses who’ve decided to be part of the story.
And that’s the reason I wanted to share this with the Best of Walsall community, because the businesses supporting Ethan are getting something real out of it.
Partners get branding on the kart and on a bespoke race suit, and tagged content across our social channels almost daily for twelve months. But the part we enjoy most is the work we do together beyond that. We film and create content regularly with AARC and with Grand Prix Racewear, where Ethan is an ambassador. We’ve been out to Haywards Transport, Murray & Willis, Ads Creative, Wagstaff Recruitment and Uggly & Co to shoot photography and video with their teams — and honestly, meeting the people behind those businesses has been one of the best parts of this whole journey.
This season Ethan is contesting two championships: TVKC at PF International and the Shenington Kart Championship. We still need to find £6,000 to complete the 2026 season.
For 2027 the ambition is bigger — doubling the budget, potentially adding the Whilton Mill and Silverstone championships, and stepping up to compete in British Championship rounds. That’s the pathway, and after last weekend I have no doubt he’s ready for it.
The long-term aim here is straightforward: to build a route to the top for a driver with genuine talent who doesn’t come from money. Motorsport makes that extraordinarily difficult, which is exactly why local support matters so much.
If you’d like to be part of it — as a sponsor, with marketing or networking ideas, or just by following along and sharing the odd post — we’d love to hear from you. We’re open to any conversation, and if you’ve got thoughts on how we could be doing this better, I’d genuinely welcome them.
Full race reports, sponsorship details and everything else:
All social channels: linktr.ee/ethanguestracing
Thanks for reading — and thanks to every Walsall business that’s already backing him.
Steve Guest, Ethan Guest Racing
