Meet the Austrian royal trying to redefine the route into motorsport

It is not often you find yourself racing against the heir to the now defunct Austro-Hungarian thrones.

While his ancestors were more concerned with being emperors of Austria and kings of Hungary, Ferdinand Habsburg has a rather different goal in mind – making motorsport more accessible.

Habsburg, or to give him his full name Ferdinand Zvonimir Maria Balthus Keith Michael Otto Antal Bahnam Leonhard von Habsburg-Lothringen, is a WEC driver who has a Le Mans win under his belt and while he continues to race with Team WRT in 2023, there is another team that takes up a significant portion of his focus.

Rebel Team aiming to create a new route into motorsport

Perhaps unusual for someone who has come from the background that Habsburg has, the 26-year-old appears to have a genuine interest in making Formula 1 and motorsport a sport for all rather than for just the sons of the mega rich.

It could not come at a more appropriate time. Of the current 20 F1 drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Esteban Ocon stand out as examples of drivers whose dad is not either a previous driver or a multi-millionaire.

The difficulties in getting into F1 are well known with the cost of karting enough to eliminate a significant portion of your everyday families but for those that do progress, they will find themselves putting forward millions to ensure their child is able to race in the single seat series.

Even if they make it to F2, the costs still outweigh the profit with Forbes predicting that an F2 driver will make on average $500k a year, or roughly a quarter of the costs they are expected to fork out.

If you get the backing of a team or wealthy sponsor, your odds of success are increased but even then, the pinnacle of the sport has only 20 seats available and perhaps one or two open every year.

It explains why stories like Hamilton’s, whose father worked three jobs before his son was taken under Ron Dennis’ wing at McLaren, are so rare.

Habsburg believes he has a solution to break the stranglehold and stop high level motorsport being a billionaire boys club.

“I’ve been trying to build fundamentals,” Hasburg told media including PlanetF1.com of his Rebel Team project.

“For me it is how can I use my position of being a racing driver, which is an extremely privileged position that very few people get to hold, to bring the real reason why we get to go racing closer in house and that’s what Rebel Team is about.”

The purpose of Rebel Team is to create a new method of sponsorship for young drivers, one that does not require wealthy individuals or internal companies but instead pools money from a number of fans or members.

By paying a membership fee, these fans will be able to participate in team decisions and have better access to the drivers and members of the team.

This fee is then given to the junior drivers to help them on their expensive journey up the motorsport ladder.

“It’s very nice to see sponsors and partners coming along, throwing money at motorsport and Formula 1 drivers, the racing drivers becoming global superstars. But it’s easy to ignore that none of that would exist without fans in the grandstands.

“The teams have done a great effort when it comes to trying to bring more behind the scenes action slowly as they permit more access. I think that’s great but I feel like there is an evolution and next step coming along.”

Rebel Team have three stated goals: achieve a fully financed car exclusively funded by fans and without dependence on sponsorship, create a community and a racing team where decisions are made by its members and create more democratic and inclusive structure in motorsport and move beyond the established business model, aiming to satisfy sponsors as the only stakeholders.

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It is an ambitious project but one that Habsburg thinks was always going to exist one day.

“It’s my personal attempt to see if we can create a platform where fans don’t just consume and spend but they actually participate,” he said. “It’s been extremely difficult because it’s a new idea that doesn’t exist in motorsport. Nobody’s done this before.

“I personally think that if I don’t do it in the next two or three years, someone else will do it themselves.”

The project was launched in 2022 and is very much in its infant stages. A soft launch of their membership scheme was launched in March before being made available to the public in April with the goal of one day having thousands of members.

团队接着在th比赛登场e 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours, finishing fifth in the LMP2 class and 13th overall.

Given Habsburg’s background, it is obvious that their starting moves have been made in the WEC but the Austrian wants to one day conquer IndyCar and F1.

“I’m super flexible,” Habsburg said of how far he is casting his net in search for young talent. “You have to narrow it down to a certain extent or else you just get a bit complicated with things.

“You want to draw some lines but for me IndyCar, Formula 1, WEC, those are the obvious choices.

“We don’t want to oversaturate the amount of memberships that we are offering because then your voting power becomes less valuable in the sense but if we have enough then we can really afford to go into let’s say a smaller championship like F4 or F3 that are extremely popular, where you can really start to maybe build relationships with different junior drivers.

“That’s kind of the goal where we need to start to put our foot in. As Rebel Team grows, my long term goal in five years is to have scaled far enough within the motorsport community to be able to go into places like Formula 1 and IndyCar.”

无论是果阿l is ever realised only time will tell but if it does fail, it certainly will not be through the want of trying.

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