The Cutting Courses

Ondrej Vostatek is 12 years old. He's been racing since he was six years old, has won mini road racing championships in the Czech Republic and in Germany. He's raced in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Holland and Spain.

Vostatek has raced Honda NSF100s and Moto4 machines - twin-spar aluminum framed machines powered by 25-horsepower Honda CRF150 engines cranking out 25 horsepower and weighing 165 pounds.

Now he's competing in the FIM CEV Repsol European Talent Cup series on a Honda NSF250R, a 250cc four-stroke single with a GP twin-spar frame, a bike that kicks out 46 horsepower and weighs 185 pounds.

That is the specification of the machine Vostatek races.

He's one of 29 riders competing in the entire series. The teams competing in the series have direct links to the teams competing in MotoGP and are funded by some of the same companies whose logos appear on the fairings of MotoGP machines. MotoGP factory rider Alex Rins runs a team in the series.

That is the level of competition Vostatek races at.

He's 12.

And he's not the youngest rider in the class.

There is a term that first-year law students quickly learn. It is the phrase "Cutting Course." These are the courses that are designed to weed out the students who will not  be successful lawyers. They are wicked-hard, and the instructors are merciless. The point is to allow only the most talented to proceed. The rest are cut.

Spain is the Cutting Course of motorcycle road racing. Much has been written about how the Spanish domination of Grand Prix racing is bad for the sport. But the fact is that no country has made motorcycle road racing its national sport in the way that Spain has.

No country has institutionalized the care and feeding of young racers quite the way that Spain has. There are institutions and academies where young, young children spend hours and hours riding pocketbikes around cones while instructors bark information at them. Want your youngster to train with the father of five-time World Champion Jorge Lorenzo? You can enroll him or her in the Lorenzo Competition schools at the age of two.

Two.

No country has an infrastructure designed to give young races a step-by-step ladder of machinery quite like Spain has. Take, for example, the BeOn Automotive company's line of GP machinery, starting with 25-horsepower GP machines with twin-spar chassis and moving up to Moto3 spec bikes. And they are not the only company doing so in Spain.

While you can find similar companies and schools elsewhere in the world, what you are unlikely to find is ferocity of the competition at such a young age. The FIM CEV Repsol series posts full-length videos of its races on YouTube. The races are well worth watching - the kids in the European Talent Cup and the Moto3 classes race like if they don't win, they don't eat. And if they succeed there, they have at least a chance of making the jump to professional International racing. There's no guarantee that they'll succeed. But it's hard to think of a racer who's failed in Spanish youth road racing and then gone on to success at the higher levels.

Some of the countries in Asia are starting to put together similar systems. The Asia Talent Cup races are - and have been for a while - spectacular, although their success at putting their graduates into International competition has been limited to date.

MotoAmerica has, undoubtedly, saved professional road racing in the United States. But one of the reasons given for its formation was to create a clear path to International level racing and to groom talent in the States for racing at that level. It's not enough to simply clear the path. It has to start much, much earlier than the KTM RC Cup series and Superstock 600 racing.

Think of it this way: By the time Vostatek is 14, he'll have had three seasons in the European Talent Cup on the NSF250R, fighting against nearly 30 other riders backed by International-level teams. He could move up to a full-blown, aluminum GP-chassis Moto3 machine with about 50 horsepower, where the bike and rider combined weigh as little as 329 pounds, and test his skills against the packed, factory-supported Moto3 fields in the CEV series.

In the U.S., riders 14 years old who want to compete at the FIM CEV Repsol-equivalent level, MotoAmerica, would find themselves racing a 38-horsepower bike with a trellis steel frame that weighs 304 pounds by itself - rider not included. And they'll be racing fields that are about half the size of the Moto3 CEV fields.

When those racers turn 16, graduates of which series will find GP team managers calling?

A clear path is only one step. To be successful, one has to be able to follow the path.