Skipping A Step Or Three

Jordan Sanders is a teenager who is in a hurry to make a mark on the sportscar scene.

- Rob Ladbrook

There are few teenagers in the world that can say that they stood on the top step at Le Mans on their 17th birthday. There are even fewer who can vault from arrive-and-drive karting to international prototype racing in just two years.

The career of Jordan Sanders is unique because of these two facts. And the story behind his rise so far is about as unconventional as it gets.

This year he’s gearing up to tackle the full VdeV Endurance Series aboard a 575bhp Ginetta G57-P2 prototype, a car capable of emulating the speeds and forces of LMP2. Yet, just three seasons ago he was racing in Easykart’s Junior arrive-and-drive division. That’s one hell of a jump, especially for a 17-year-old.

“My career has been anything but conventional, I guess,” says the Leicester man. “The usual route would be to come out of karting, do a year in something like Ginetta Juniors, then maybe some singleseaters, and then look at GTs or sports prototypes. Somehow I’ve managed to skip all of those stages and jump straight from a kart into Le Mans prototypes. It’s been totally surreal in truth.”

Sanders never committed fully to top-line karting. There were the odd appearances in KF Junior, mostly in the German DKM class in 2014 where he raced against drivers like world karting champion and now BRDC British F3 driver Enaam Ahmed, Michael Schumacher’s son, Mick Jr, and European F3 racer David Beckmann.

But Super One, he skipped it. WSK, nope. CIK-FIA, just a one-off at PFi. Sanders put his studies first, and then looked straight to cars, sportscars to be precise.

“We didn’t see the value in top-level karting, so we just jumped in and out of the professional championships to learn the racecraft and the skills as and where,” says Sanders.