Here’s my honest take, and I’m about as qualified as it gets to answer this one, because I race against these stud 12-year-olds every single weekend. And every single weekend, at least one of them reminds me exactly where I stand.
It makes them good. Full stop. But it also makes one thing painfully clear: as I’ve gotten older, I have WAY less balls than they do. Think about it. I flipped once and was sore for three weeks. Three weeks of groaning every time I got out of bed. These kids flip, dust themselves off, and ask what time the B-Main goes off. Meanwhile I’m at the counter buying ibuprofen in bulk.
And that’s the part nobody wants to admit. Somewhere along the way, your brain starts doing math it never used to do. At 12, the throttle is a light switch. On or off. There’s no mortgage sitting in the back of your mind, no job you have to show up to Monday morning, no thought of “if I stuff this thing in the fence, that’s a month of pay to fix it.” A 12-year-old sends it into turn one because the concept of consequences literally hasn’t been installed yet. That’s not recklessness. That’s a superpower. And it’s one you don’t get back.
But here’s the other side of it, and this is what actually gets me excited about where this sport is headed. These kids aren’t just fearless, they’re FAST, and there’s a reason for it. Seat time. We used to race maybe on a Saturday night. That was the whole program. Load up, race, unload, wait a week. These kids are racing three nights a week, sometimes more, and they’re doing it in multiple types of cars. Restricted one night, a-class the next, hopping in something else on the weekend. They’re getting more laps in a month than a lot of us got in an entire season growing up.
And when they’re not at the track? They’re on the sim, running hundreds of laps a night. So by the time that kid rolls up next to you for the feature, he’s already made every mistake there is to make a thousand times in his bedroom. You’re racing on Saturday night experience. He’s racing on year-round experience. That gap adds up fast.
Say what you want, but the talent pipeline in micro sprint racing right now is the deepest it’s ever been, and it’s not particularly close. These kids getting all these reps is exactly why.
Now, could all of this just mean I’m bad? Sure. It could. That’s a very real possibility that I’ve chosen not to explore. My pride isn’t ready for that conversation yet, and frankly I’ve still got plenty of races left to lose before I’m forced to have it!
So what are your thoughts? Do you suck, or do these kids just have a little more fight in them than you do? And be honest, because half of you reading this got beat by a middle schooler last weekeand I want to hear about it.
Drop it in the comments.
