Of the 2,275 cadets aged eight to twelve, enrolled in TeamSport’s UK Race Academy, only 146 are girls. That is roughly six in every hundred. Long before anyone is talking about junior single-seaters, or F1 Academy, the numbers have already thinned out. Girls in grassroots karting don’t disappear near the top of the pyramid, they disappear near the bottom.
This is a different story to the one usually told about women in motorsport. Most versions start at Formula 1 and work backwards; not enough seats or not enough sponsors. Sometimes even, not enough belief that a woman can win a Grand prix. All of that is real. However, it treats the shortage as something that happens later, once the stakes rise. The data says otherwise. The pipeline for girls in grassroots karting narrows almost immediately, long before anyone races for points.
The Funnel That Goes Unknown
Karting is the most female-friendly branch of motorsport that exists, by a wide margin. Driver-development group More Than Equal, found that women make up around 13% of karting participants worldwide. That’s the highest share of any category in the sport. Yet that number drops to just 7% once drivers move into Formula and GT racing.
Karting, therefore, itself isn’t the problem. It’s the strongest entry point the sport has. It is after they try karting that the real trouble begins.
TeamSport, the UK’s largest karting operator, welcomes around 45,000 girls through its venues every year for casual sessions. That’s a huge number of eight to twelve-year-olds discovering they like going fast. However, almost none of them go on to race. The jump from a Saturday taster session, to a structured Cadet-class programme, is where the numbers collapse, and they collapse specifically for girls.
A more subtle gap hides in the same data. More Than Equal found that girls typically start karting two years later than boys, on average. Lewis Hamilton was eight when he first climbed into a kart. A two-year head start sounds small. However, over a childhood spent building race craft, it isn’t.
Where Girls in Grassroots Karting Actually Go
For most girls, the honest answer is: nowhere past the taster day. It’s important to be precise about where the drop happens because it changes what the fix should look like.
Girls don’t try karting and dislike it. That’s not the issue. The real issue is different: almost nobody builds a bridge. Nothing connects a fun rental-kart session to racing every second weekend in a competitive Cadet class. Historically, fathers who already raced built that bridge informally, mostly for sons expected to follow their footsteps.
When someone builds a structured bridge instead, the effects show up fast. Motorsport UK and F1 Academy launched Discover Your Drive in 2023 across six TeamSport venues, aimed at eight-to-twelve year olds. It produced a 265% increase in girls entering the following year’s British Indoor Karting Championship. That’s not even close to a marginal improvement. It’s proof that the pipeline had shut down, and briefly propping it back open had worked.
The FIA has since built the same logic into a global strategy. Its new Global Karting Plan targets exactly this kind of blockage at the entry point:
“Karting is where motor sport begins and it is where the future is built,” – FIA, Global Karting Plan announcement
This ambition is crucial. This leak happens everywhere karting exists, not just in Britain.
The Cost of a Cadet Kart
Money is the first wall almost everyone hits, regardless of gender. However, it is an obstacle that cannot be ignored due to just how high that wall stands. “Expensive” simply undersells it.
A rental session can cost £20 to £50 for ten minutes. That’s the accessible end of the sport, and it’s where most of those 45,000 annual TeamSport visits happen. Owning a competitive Cadet kart costs far more: £1,200 to £4,200 depending on the equipment’s age. A season of tyres, entry fees and engine rebuilds adds another £3,000 to £8,000 on top. Push into national-level competition, and a season can run from £8,000 to £22,000, once you factor in travel and testing.
None of this targets girls specifically, however, families often decide who gets first claim on a tight racing budget. They also decide which kid’s karting habit counts as investment, and which counts as a phase. It becomes a cultural question, as much as a financial one – and it sits right on top of the funnel.
A Father-and-Son Sport
Ask female drivers who made it through, what grassroots karting felt like. The same pattern shows up almost every time. They were the only girl at the track. Everyone around them assumed that was temporary.
Bianca Bustamante grew up karting in the Philippines, becoming the first female driver in McLaren’s Driver Development Programme. She described the atmosphere plainly:
“Every time that I practiced on circuits, I would always be the only girl.” – Bianca Bustamante, ex-F1 Academy driver
She’s said the paddocks she grew up in worked less like open competitions, rather they felt more like a ritual passed between fathers and sons. Mothers and sisters rarely featured at all.
Abbi Pulling, the 2024 F1 Academy champion, tells a similar story from British club karting. Other children didn’t treat her differently, their fathers did, uncomfortable at the idea of losing to a girl:
“The dads who wouldn’t want their sons getting beaten by a girl.” – Abbi Pulling, 2024 F1 Academy champion
Neither driver blames the kids on track. Instead, they point to the adults standing around it. What did those adults silently communicate about whether a girl belonged there at all?
The Missing Middle
Look at where funded programmes for girls actually sit, and a gap appears. Entry-level schemes like Discover Your Drive target eight-to-twelve-year-olds. Elite pathways like F1 Academy and More Than Equal’s Driver Development Programme, target drivers around sixteen and up. By then, scouts already rate them as fast. In between sits the hardest, longest, priciest stretch of the ladder — competitive national karting through the early teens. Almost nothing holds girls there specifically.
Rachel Robertson came up through British karting before reaching F1 Academy. Asked what still needs fixing, she points to exactly this gap:
“Motorsport is incredibly expensive, particularly once you get into competitive karting and cars.” — Rachel Robertson, F1 Academy driver
The same structural gap shows up again, further up the ladder, making it look like a pattern, not a coincidence. Former F1 engineer Rob Smedley makes a near-identical point. Sponsored young women reach single-seaters, then find nowhere clear to go next:
“There is no next step for them now.” — Rob Smedley, ex-Formula 1 engineer, Global Karting League
Support clusters at the two most visible ends of a driver’s journey. There’s the charming taster day, and the triumphant academy graduate. The unglamorous middle, where most careers get built or end, gets far less attention and funding.
Why Girls in Grassroots Karting Keep Leaving
Put the pieces together, and a fuller picture forms. Girls start later. The jump from taster session to competitive racing offers little support and costs a lot. For decades, the culture around club karting has run on an unspoken father-son script. And the years a young karter needs the most backing, are the years with the least support. That’s exactly when she needs to push into national competition, and support built for her specifically barely exists.
Worth noting, cautiously: this stretch of adolescence is also when girls drop out of organised sport generally. Per the Women’s Sports Foundation, girls quit at roughly twice the rate of boys. Nobody has rigorously studied whether that broader pattern plays out the same way inside karting. But the timing overlap is hard to ignore. Early adolescence lines up almost exactly with the point where grassroots karting support disappears.
None of this needs a villain. It just needs almost nobody working against girls in grassroots karting. And it needs almost nothing built to help them, right when the sport turns most expensive and least forgiving.
The Next Step for Girls in Grassroots Karting
The good news: where someone has tried the fix, it has worked fast. Motorsport UK’s Discover Your Drive didn’t need a decade to move the numbers. It needed one pilot season and six venues to produce a 265% jump in girls racing competitively.
Cameron Biggs frames the work as connective tissue, not a single big fix:
“We’re really trying to join the dots between grassroots and elite.” — Cameron Biggs, Coaching and Academy Pathway Manager
That’s the honest scale of the problem. It was never really about finding one more brilliant driver at sixteen. It’s about making sure the ten-year-old who loved her rental-kart session last Saturday has somewhere real to go next. And it’s about finding someone willing to help her afford it. Fix that stretch of track, and the rest of the pipeline stops being a mystery.