Little Racers, where it all begins: the first Corsedimoto Global Documentary

At Silverstone, we went looking for the MotoGP riders of the future. But “Little Racers” became something more: the first experiment in a new narrative approach that we want to bring into the way Corsedimoto tells stories.

While today's MotoGP stars were racing just a few hundred metres away on the Grand Prix circuit, the riders we met were six, seven, eight or ten years old. Their motorcycles are tiny. Their dreams are already enormous.

When our British contributor Andrew McLarney went to Silverstone, we didn't ask him to collect the usual paddock quotes or produce another conventional race-weekend video.

The original idea deliberately went in another direction: go to Silverstone and show us why this place is special. We wanted to meet British motorcycle fans, experience their racing culture, perhaps go into the pubs, and above all find good stories and interesting people.

Andrew was given considerable freedom to interpret that brief. And in the weeks before the Grand Prix, he began doing something particularly interesting. He started building contacts among local fans and members of the racing community, announcing that he would be at Silverstone for Corsedimoto and looking for people with stories worth telling.

That search eventually brought him to FAB-Racing, the organisation that has been running British championships for young riders since 2004. And that is where our original project changed completely.

At Silverstone's kart circuit, as part of the Road to MotoGP pathway, Andrew met children who are barely old enough to have started primary school. But they already wear helmets and leathers like real racers.

Behind them are teams, instructors and parents. They already have rivals. They have already experienced the pain of crashing. They are beginning to understand that motorcycle racing is a difficult sport in which losing happens much more often than winning. And inside those helmets is an enormous dream. Just beyond the kart circuit is that huge Grand Prix track, surrounded by packed grandstands. That is where they want to be one day. Only a very small number will ever get there. They know that too.

Andrew McLarney talked to them, but more importantly, he got them talking. And he allowed us to see that inside those oversized helmets there aren't miniature professional athletes programmed to repeat the right answers.

There are boys and girls. They tell us why they race, what it feels like and who they want to become. They talk about speed and overtaking almost as if it were still a game. But they also talk about crashes and fear. Around them is an entire ecosystem of parents, technicians, teams, instructors and organisers that allows a child to begin imagining a path towards professional motorcycle racing. The motorcycle becomes the setting. People become the story.

In the narrative model we are beginning to explore, motorsport stops being simply a matter of lap times, technical settings, racing lines and results. It becomes storytelling.

There is another reason why we wanted to tell this story. Grassroots racing forms the base of the entire motorcycle racing pyramid, yet it rarely receives meaningful visibility in the media — even specialist motorcycle media — until one of its young protagonists becomes a champion many years later. And yet this is where everything begins.

FAB-Racing develops young British riders, but Britain is certainly not alone. Italy also has an important network of riding schools, academies, instructors, teams and families working with very young racers. Corsedimoto has close relationships with some of them. We have a long-established relationship with 23 Riders Academy, and one of its young riders, Thor Kamml, appears in Little Racers. We have also been following the work of former World Championship rider Gianluca Nannelli and his Nannelli Riders Academy, and we have already begun discussing what could potentially be developed together.

It would be fascinating one day to tell a Little Racers story in Italy. Not a copy of this documentary, of course. Because what we have discovered and tested at Silverstone is not a format to reproduce. It is a method.

Video has become one of the dominant languages of sports media. Go to a circuit with a phone, record an interview, add some paddock or racing footage, edit it quickly and put it online. It is modern, immediate and useful. But with Corsedimoto Documentary, we wanted to experiment with something else. Start with an idea. Search for characters. Prepare before arriving at the event. Allow the people and opportunities you discover to change the original idea. And eventually turn those elements into a story with its own narrative arc. That is how Little Racers was born. A documentary exists when there is a story worth telling.

The narrative research we are doing is not limited to motorsport. Within the wider editorial ecosystem of which Corsedimoto is a part, we are experimenting with similar ideas in apparently very different territories: literature, theatre, culture and other forms of storytelling. One of these projects is MattiaPascal, our Italian-language digital publication dedicated to culture, books, theatre and activism.

At almost exactly the same time Andrew was filming Little Racers at Silverstone, MattiaPascal was telling another story hundreds of miles away. We followed the genesis and dramaturgy of “Cosmos” (details here) a theatrical performance created by Firenze Guidi and performed by around thirty very young artists.

More than half of them come from outside Italy: British and Irish performers, young women from the Czech Republic, as well as performers from the United States, Mexico and elsewhere. On the surface, Cosmos and Little Racers could hardly be further apart. A performance space and a kart circuit. Young actors and young motorcycle racers. Culture and motorsport. But the narrative principle is surprisingly similar.

A motorcycle race can be told through the people who make it possible. A theatrical performance can be understood through the people who create it and bring it to the stage. Different worlds can require different languages, but the search for human stories remains the same. Perhaps the future of digital publishing is not simply about producing more content. Perhaps it is also about returning to recognisable stories worth remembering.

Little Racers has another important characteristic. It was conceived and produced directly in English, before being made available to our established Italian audience with Italian subtitles. That makes it one of the first genuinely international original productions of the project we are developing as Corsedimoto Global.

Global will not simply be a stream of Corsedimoto's Italian articles translated into English. We want to progressively build an international presence capable of finding stories from other worlds, telling them where they happen and in the language in which they happen, and then bringing the best of them back to our Italian audience too.

For many years Corsedimoto has reported on MotoGP, World Superbike and international motorcycle racing from Italy. We know that world very well. But we don't want that experience to become a boundary. We want it to become a starting point.

Silverstone was our first laboratory. And perhaps these children are where everything begins.