The Journey

It started before my eighth birthday. Dad turned up at the local track with a go-kart – not because there was a grand plan, but because Mum was studying and he wanted something to do with his son. Then my brother started racing too, and that was it: two competitive kids, one stopwatch, no way back.

Those first two seasons were club days and circuit time – nothing flashy, just laps. But I’d already found the thing I was chasing. Every session I wanted to be quicker than the last. The fire was lit early, and it never went out.

This is where club racing turned into a career. I entered my first Goldstar Championship in Cadet Rok and set the KartSport Taranaki lap record – a record that still stands today. In 2018 I went one better and won the championship outright.

That year also gave me my first taste of racing offshore, at the City of Melbourne titles in Australia. Different track, different competition, same thing I was after: prove I belonged. I came home knowing karting had taught me everything it could. It was time for cars.

A Formula First test with Sabre Motorsport changed the trajectory. The team owner saw enough to back me, and I committed fully to single-seaters. Cars are a different language – the way they load, the way they talk back through the wheel, the data you have to read afterwards. I had to relearn how to drive.

COVID disrupted everything in those years, but the work didn’t stop. In 2021 I won the Formula First Winter Series at Manfeild and took the Rod Ball Memorial Trophy. That was the proof I needed: I could win in cars, not just karts.

Formula Ford is where New Zealand sorts the quick from the serious. I won the Winter Series on debut – a statement first up. Then the North Island Championship went all the way to the wire, decided on the very last lap of the very last race. I finished runner-up by the smallest margin there is.

My first crack at the national NZ Formula Ford Championship yielded sixth. Not the headline I wanted – but I was taking notes the entire time. Every corner I left on the table, every race I’d run differently. I knew exactly how good I could be. I just had to put a whole season together cleanly.

2024 was the hardest decision of my career so far: we sat the season out. The programme wasn’t where it needed to be, and mechanical issues would have meant turning up underprepared – and turning up underprepared isn’t racing, it’s hoping.

So we made the call to rest, regroup, and aim everything at one target. It’s not a chapter people usually put on a CV. But the discipline to not race when it isn’t right is part of why the next year went the way it did. Sometimes the smartest lap is the one you don’t take.

Seven wins from fourteen starts. A fifty percent win rate. Ten podiums. I led the NAPA Auto Parts NZ Formula Ford Championship from the front all season and clinched the title at Manfeild with a race still to run – 923 points, 131 clear of the field.

Then I won the Morrie Smith Memorial – the eighteen-lap classic – for the second time. Written down, it reads clean. It wasn’t. Every result was fought for, every weekend earned the hard way. But we got there.

Winning the championship opened a door very few New Zealand drivers ever get near: the Rodin Cars Formula Ford to Formula 1 Programme. I was one of two drivers invited to a three-day evaluation at Rodin’s private facility at Mt Lyford, running Formula 4 machinery on wings and slicks.

Rodin’s Emma Duncan said I “just had the edge” – and that edge earned a UK test at Pembrey in Wales, a Spanish F4 car, plus simulator work and a seat fitting at Rodin’s Surrey headquarters. In the same window I was selected for MotorSport New Zealand’s Elite Academy. The championship was the goal. This was the proof the ceiling sits a long way higher than I’d been told.

2026 is the biggest step I’ve taken. I’ve signed with Miedecke Motorsport – Ford’s customer GT4 squad in Australia – to race the #95 Ford Mustang GT4 in the Monochrome GT4 Australia Championship, sharing the car with 2025 Radical Cup champion Cooper Cutts.

The Mustang has presence: more power, more downforce, more noise than anything I’d driven. Racing GT machinery on the Shannons SpeedSeries bill, inside the Supercars ecosystem, is a different world from a New Zealand Formula Ford grid. The Bend didn’t go our way – contact ended the weekend early – but a long season rewards the persistent. I’m not here to make up the numbers.