The youngest winner in Formula E history got there by the skin of his teeth, and he says the ladder is worse now.
Taylor Barnard became the youngest race winner in Formula E's history on Sunday at 22 years and 76 days, passing Nyck de Vries at the final corner with two laps left, in the same weekend the championship decided its title. In the early hours of that same race day, the BBC published an interview in which he described how close the ladder came to shutting him out: he got into racing, he said, by the "skin of my teeth", and at one stage his family had to re-mortgage their house so he could continue. "We really did put everything on the line for me to be able to make it," he told Newsbeat. "I would be lying if we're still not stinging from when we did that."
Timing makes the interview better evidence, not worse. Nothing in it is warmed by a trophy. A driver on the eve of a season finale, four podiums into his rookie-year reputation and a race seat already banked, still described his family as stinging from the mortgage decision years later, and said that a boy in his position starting today would not make it: costs are now "so blown out of proportion" that he doubts his own path exists any more.
He went further than the money. "There's definitely people that have bought their way in or haven't earned their way," he said, and "there's definitely been people out there, younger guys or girls that have the talent and the skill to be able to make it, which just gets shut out by financial issues. That's not right. And the way that it's going in the last few years, it's only getting worse." That is the youngest winner in the championship's history saying, in public, that the grid he beat contains drivers who purchased their places.
That ladder has published prices. BBC Sport's April accounting of the single-seater pathway puts a competitive karting season at 130,000 pounds for an eight-year-old and up to 260,000 by thirteen, an entry-level Formula 4 season at 520,000, Formula 3 at up to 1.6 million and Formula 2 at up to 2.3 million. The interview subjects in that piece bracket the range: George Russell put his family's outlay at about a million pounds over twelve years and paid 800,000 for his title-winning F2 season; Jos Verstappen prices karting at 10,000 to 15,000 euros a race. Barnard climbed exactly this staircase, karting through Formula 4, Formula 3 and Formula 2, before McLaren's Formula E programme took him on as a reserve and an injury substitution at Monaco in 2024 gave him his debut.
What the sport says back is process language. An FIA spokesperson told Newsbeat that "improving accessibility and affordability in motorsport is a core priority", that some competing costs sit "outside the FIA's direct remit", and that its affordable cross car, girls on track and karting programmes aim to lower "financial barriers". Barnard himself declined to prescribe: he said he is not sure what the governing body or the teams can best do, because he recognises the sport is a business. The gap between those two positions, a priority asserted and a fix nobody can name, is where the next family's mortgage decision gets made.
Sunday's result gives the interview its edge. Sunday was not a case for potential: he won the race, on the aggressive late Attack Mode strategy, against the two Mahindras that had controlled it, on the final start of the DS Automobiles entry that employed him. The ladder's most expensive product beat everybody on the day his family's bet finally paid out, while telling anyone who would listen that the bet has become unplaceable. Both halves are true at once, and the second one is the story that outlasts the record, because his record now waits for a challenger whose family can cover the stake.