“The goal was to catch up as best as possible and be as efficient as we could.”

Kai Daryanani, currently racing in Eurocup-3 with MP Motorsport and GB3 with JHR Developments

Those are the words of Kai Daryanani – young racing driver, and a late starter in the sport. As he closes in on the end of his third season in competition, he sits nicely in the top 10 of the ultra-competitive GB3 Championship. He has also shown himself as a regular points scorer on his outings in his parallel programme, the Eurocup-3 Series. In those three years of racing, he has arguably been the busiest single-seater driver on Planet Earth.

The cheerful 20-year-old Indian has, in many ways, bucked the trend of the accepted path into single-seater racing. A decade of karting culminating in the white-hot World and European scene at the age of 13 and 14? That couldn’t happen for Daryanani.

“I wanted to start karting, but my family live in Hong Kong and there’s no circuits there, so the closest option was to go across the border into China,” he explains. “That’s what we did for a month and a half. Every Sunday we’d drive two hours there and two hours back. It was the Golden Apple Circuit at Zhuhai. After six or seven trips, COVID happened and everything shut down. I’d just started from scratch and it was, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Kai and his manager, Dan Wells

Dan Wells, who acts as Daryanani’s manager, takes up the story: “I was selling a lot of simulators throughout Asia. Through COVID they had been very, very popular. I got a contact through my website. I think it was Kai’s dad, who was asking about buying a sim. I sold the sim, my team installed it, and then I got another message: ‘Can you come and do some coaching with him?’

“I watched Kai drive Spa in the F3 car, and I said, ‘What racing have you done?’ He said he couldn’t do anything. He was stuck in Hong Kong, which doesn’t have a kart track. I liked the way he went about his driving. You could see he wasn’t a driver who just went out and crashed – he built up to it. I said, ‘Is this something you’re looking to do?’ So we did that session, and a couple of weeks later his mum was angling to help him into motorsport…”

And so Daryanani’s bid to ‘catch up as best as possible’ began. This began with Wells taking him to his own home country, the UK, in the summer of 2022. “We did two race weekends in a Senior X30 go-kart, one at Shenington and one at Clay Pigeon,” recalls Daryanani. “We did four or so days of karting testing. We did a little bit of sim prep for F4 testing, and from that point it was, ‘Do we have the potential to have a career and get started and do some racing?’ And the answer was yes.”

Simulator training during COVID shutdown

“There were simulators, psychometrics, some kart testing, some kart racing, some F4 testing,” adds Wells. “It had a bit of everything, just to put him through his paces and see where he was at.”

The next step was to pull together a host of programmes in Formula 4 for 2023, which continued into 2024. Over those two seasons, Daryanani completed an astonishing total of over 140 races in F4 on 22 circuits in the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. For 2023, Wells pulled together deals with Pinnacle Motorsport in F4 UAE and South East Asia, plus Virtuosi Racing in British F4. There were also outings in GB4 with Evans GP, and in Euro 4 and Spanish F4 with Cram Motorsport. For 2024, it was Pinnacle again in F4 UAE, a switch to Fortec Motorsport for British F4, plus more races with Cram in Italian F4 and Euro 4.

British F4 Round 6 Zandvoort

The catch-up was in full swing. “This is the thing,” says Wells. “A lot of the kids, from seven or eight years old, sometimes younger, they’re racing, and he started at 17. It was a case of planning his programme so he could gain the experience, and it was tailored in a way in which he got that experience.”

One aspect of this, Wells adds, was avoiding the high-profile biggest teams, and gaining that experience in a more intimate environment: “If you come in and go straight to the top team, you’re not making use of it, so we had to figure a development plan so he could learn about car set-up, different conditions. I said you have to be in the UK because you need to know about cold and wet weather, all of the things that everyone’s been doing since eight years old when they go out in a go-kart. It was very specific to catch him up on experience. Once you get to F3, you do push-pull-push and that’s your lot. Everything until 2027 has to be getting him catching up on that experience so he can make use of it once he climbs up the ladder and driving time is a lot more limited.”

Racing with Fortec Motorsport in British F4

Daryanani, based in Brackley near Silverstone since his move to car racing, made a big step in British F4 in 2024 with Fortec. He became a regular in the points, with a handful of top-six finishes, peaking with a trio of fourths. “There was definitely good progress in the right direction,” he reflects. “Just in terms of mental state – we knew the tracks, although the car felt a little bit different from team to team.”

But the big breakthrough came in the end-of-season Formula Trophy UAE series with Evans GP. With this team, Daryanani had already scored his maiden race win in GB4 in 2023 at Brands Hatch, plus another victory in a one-off in Australian F4 at that series’ round at Sepang in Malaysia. After a solid opening weekend in Dubai, Daryanani beat the might of Prema Racing to take victory in front of the F1 crowd at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix support event.

Racing with MP Motorsport in Eurocup-3

Wells was confident that Daryanani could handle the pressure of arriving at MP, one of those ‘mega-teams’ they had formerly shied away from: “He’s building in a good way to this point where when he did go into MP this year – a champion team, and I managed to figure a way to get him in there – if he’d been in a top team any sooner he’d have been broken. It was about building him up as a driver to get him the confidence, and then when he entered this year and he’s got team-mates like Rinicella, Cardenas, Colnaghi – really top-reference guys – he’s able to hold his own, which last year he wouldn’t have been able to do. It’s been very calculated.”

Daryanani is loving his experience at JHR: “It’s a good environment to work in. There’s no blame game – we all want to improve together.” And he’s enjoying MP too: “When I first met them, they have so many mechanics and team personnel it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of people.’ But as you get to know them, they’re all super-nice people, supportive and helpful, and really nice to work with. Jumping between cars with not much time in between is not the easiest thing, but there’s been good improvements. Just working on being a bit more consistent in that sense and continuing to build.”

And that’s what it’s all about. Daryanani is still catching up, but this highly personable young racer has the attitude to do that. One more year at his current level in 2026, and he’ll be on his next step up the ladder with the support of his manager/mentor. “He’s made some really good progress,” approves Wells. “He’s taken a couple of podiums. He’s had pace. He’s top 10 in GB3 in his first year in the bigger cars. In Eurocup-3 he’s been top 10 at all but one event.” That phone call about a simulator really paid off…

Eurocup-3 Jerez