Why I'm Coming Back to Karting — And Why I'm Building Kart Wire

I hadn't sat in a kart in decades.

Back in the day, I raced under my father's dealership, Apache Motorsports, out of Colby, Kansas — a Coyote kart dealer where I grew up around the sport from the time I was five years old. By my early teens I'd strung together seven consecutive track championships, six IKF Regional Points Leader titles, and a podium finish at the IKF Grand Nationals. Karting wasn't a hobby in our house. It was the family business, the family sport, and for a while, it was my whole identity.

Then life happened the way it does. Twenty-four years of building operations for companies — commercial construction, healthcare facilities, a stretch in ministry, nonprofit work — and somewhere in there, the kart went quiet.

This year, I decided to bring it back — and this time it's not just me. My kids are getting into it right alongside me. I'm building a CompKart Covert with a Briggs LO206 running in Senior class, prepping for KART/MARRS competition at tracks like Hallett and Ozarks International Raceway. I'm calculating gear ratios again. I'm digging through sprocket inventory again. I'm doing the exact math I did as a fourteen-year-old, except now I'm doing it as a 40-something Director of Operations who fixes broken systems for a living, with my own kids watching and learning the same way I once did.

And that second part is why I'm not just racing again. It's why I'm launching Kart Wire.

What I Found Coming Back:

Here's the thing nobody tells you about leaving a sport for twenty years and then walking back in: you notice everything the people who never left stopped seeing.

I noticed how much it costs to get a kid on track for a single season. I noticed how many tracks around the country are one bad insurance renewal away from closing their gates for good. I noticed how thin turnout can get at club-level races that used to be packed grids, and how sponsorship dollars that flow easily to European junior programs barely trickle into grassroots American karting at all. I noticed the gap between what karting looks like in the UK and Germany — structured, funded, treated like the foundational motorsport pipeline it actually is — and what it looks like here, where too often it runs on the goodwill of a handful of track owners and volunteer race directors who are one exhausted season away from walking away.

I also noticed something else: almost nobody is writing about any of this. There's plenty of race coverage — who won, who's leading points, which chassis dominated the weekend. What there isn't is a publication willing to ask why a track in your region shut its doors, why a promising Junior class stalled out because three families couldn't afford the season, or how a class like E10/E20 Rotax actually gets built and sustained here instead of just imported and hoped for.

What Kart Wire Is For

I'm not building Kart Wire to cover millionaires and superstars. That coverage already exists, and honestly, it's not where karting lives. Karting lives with the family running a fifteen-year-old chassis out of a borrowed trailer. It lives with the track owner personally covering the liability premium increase because the club can't absorb it. It lives with the arrive-and-drive racer who's one entry fee away from sitting a season out, and the "blue shock" backmarker who's out there every single weekend for the love of it, not the trophy.

That's who I'm writing for. That's who I want reading this. And eventually, that's who I want writing for it too.

This Isn't Just About Drivers

Here's something else I want to be clear about: karting doesn't just need faster drivers. It needs builders.

It needs the person with office and operations experience who can help a struggling track run its books straight and survive another insurance renewal. It needs salespeople who know how to walk into a business and actually close a sponsorship instead of just hoping one shows up. It needs entrepreneurs willing to bet on a series, a track, or a team when nobody else will. It needs people who understand branding and can help a class, a track, or a driver actually look like something worth sponsoring. It needs organizers, marketers, mechanics, photographers, writers — people who've never turned a lap in their life but have exactly the skill grassroots karting is missing.

If you've read this far and thought "I'm not fast enough to matter to this sport," I want you to hear this: speed is not the only way in. Karting in America needs the same thing any underbuilt organization needs — people willing to plug their real, professional skills into it and help build the groundwork. Because that groundwork is what turns a Saturday club race into the first rung of a ladder that actually reaches Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and beyond. Every driver who makes it out of karting and onto that bigger stage does it standing on infrastructure somebody else had to build first — tracks that survived, sponsors who believed in it, series that were organized well enough to matter. That's not a side project. That's the whole game.

Kart Wire exists to do three things, every week, without exception:

Cover the sport honestly — race reports and results, yes, but also the real financial and structural pressures tracks and racers are living with right now.

Lower the barrier to entry — practical, genuine help for families and racers trying to get in or stay in, without the gatekeeping.

Give the shoestring budget a voice — real interviews with real racers, not just the ones with factory rides and unlimited fuel budgets.

Show people where they fit — spotlighting the operators, sponsors, organizers, and builders proving you don't have to be behind the wheel to help drive this sport forward.

I'm not doing this because I think it'll be easy, and I'm not doing this because I have it all figured out. I'm doing it because I spent twenty years away from this sport, came back, and immediately saw work that needed doing. That's honestly the story of most of my career — I show up in places that are chaotic or underbuilt, I put structure under them, and I stay until they can stand on their own.

Grassroots American karting needs that right now. Consider this week one.

Welcome to Kart Wire. Let's build something.

— Dustin Depperschmidt, Founder, Kart Wire