If all goes according to plan, this time next week Lewis Hamilton will have made Formula One history by becoming the first driver to win the world championship in his debut season.

But while Fernando Alonso, his Spanish teammate, is not expected to be joining the champagne celebrations, there will be at least one driver who will be quaffing with the best of them. Nico Rosberg, the young German driver for Williams, and Hamilton go way back.

Right back to their early teens, in fact, when both were competing in the karting championships. “We climbed the ladder together and shared a room for about two years,” said the 22-year-old recently. “At one time I was even a step ahead.”

It is now a historical footnote that Hamilton cut his teeth on his home karting circuit of Rye House in Hertfordshire in 1993, aged eight. And it was after winning his first title two years later that he approached Ron Dennis, head of McLaren, at the Autosports Awards and told him he would like to race in F1. It was a move that precipitated Dennis’s decision to sign the young driver up to the team’s training programme and saw Lewis progress through the ranks of Formula Renault, F3 and GP2 to F1.

Today the Hamilton effect has electrified karting. His first kart recently sold for £42,000 on eBay and, according to karting experts, the sport has never been so popular. “When I started in 1986 we had 1,000 people karting on the track,” says Bill Sisley, managing director at Buckmore Park, Britain’s leading karting venue. “Last year we had 160,000 people.”

Some of this growth can be attributed to “corporate karting” where middle managers book a track for a day’s out-of-office bonding, but the appeal to young drivers (people can start racing from the age of eight) is hard to miss, according to Mark Burgess, editor of Karting magazine.

“Kart racing was looking pretty static and then the Hamilton effect took a hold really quickly,” he says. “If Lewis hadn’t come along then, it [2007] would have been a difficult year. After a couple of years where race licence applications have declined, we’re seeing more people join and more ethnic differentiation too.”

The appeal is not hard to see. Karting offers the thrills and spills of real-life racing but with less powerful machines. Nevertheless, karts can reach 100mph (although at the lower levels, power is much reduced) but the real draw and the reason it is seen as a feeder system for young talent to move into professional race cars is that it teaches the basics of finding the racing line, concentration and how to compete on the track.

Hamilton is not alone in honing his talents in a kart: Jenson Button, Michael Schumacher and Alain Prost all began their careers in karting while Ayrton Senna once described it as the purest form of motor sport.

Today a new generation of young drivers is coming through the system. In the summer 15-year-old Oliver Rowland (see panel, right), who has just become British champion in the Junior Intercontinental A (JICA) class, was signed by Dennis to McLaren’s young driver support programme, exactly as Hamilton was in 1998. Other names to watch over the coming years include Jack Harvey, 14, from Lincolnshire, who races in the KF3 class and became the 2007 European champion and 2007 British Kartmasters champion.

He will be lining up in next year’s KF2 championship with James Thorp, 15, from Worcestershire, who came third in the European junior championships, but left many onlookers open-mouthed after a sensational race in Italy where he started in 26th place after a crash in the prefinal and finished third.

So how do you get involved? The first thing to know is that anyone can turn up at a track and have a blast in a kart and even at a competitive level it is not just for children: there are championships that cater for the over16s and a series for the over35s.

To get started the best thing to do is take a test drive around a circuit in a hire kart. Any of the major race circuits run “arrive and drive” schemes that will let you discover if racing lines are in the blood. Prices start at £25 for boys and girls, and £75 for adults. The Association of Racing Kart Schools has a list of venues (www.arks.co.uk) but if you’ve never done anything like karting or motor racing before, start at one of the smaller, less intimidating indoor venues.

If this experience gets the adrenaline pumping and you want to begin the road to F1 glory it’s time to start racing competitively. For this you will need a race licence. There are 11 kart race schools recognised by the ARKS that cover the south, Midlands and north of England. The licence test costs £77, but doesn’t include use of a kart, and comprises a driving test on the circuit and a multiple-choice written test that covers rules and regulations. Successful candidates then send off for their competition licence, which costs a further £27.

At this point the costs start to mount – nobody said racing was cheap, even at this level. As well as the kit (see panel, right) there is the kart itself. Add in maintenance costs and transport costs, incurred travelling around Britain and Europe to various competitions, and the hotel bills and it’s easy to see how a season’s competitive racing is reckoned to cost between £20,000 to £50,000.

Depending on the level of racing you intend to compete in, the kart can cost anything from £2,000 to £8,000. There are many competitions and championships to choose from. The cadet classes, which cater for 8 to 12-year-olds, are the best place to start. There are three Cadet classes and all are permitted to race together: the Comer Cadet and WPT Cadet, which use a 60cc, two-stroke engine with clutch; and the Honda Cadet, which uses a Honda Gx 160cc four-stroke engine. A new Comer Cadet kart costs about £2,000 and has a top speed of 50mph (see panel right).

The next rung up are Junior classes. There are 11 classes but the most popular is Junior TKM 2S. This is for children aged 11-16 and the karts are restricted to TKM BT82 100cc Piston-Port engines, which have a maximum speed of 65-70mph and an optional clutch. Another popular choice is the Rotax MiniMax series, again for 11 to 16-year-olds. Powered by a Rotax 125cc with an air restrictor, it progresses into Junior Max as the driver turns 13, when the restrictor is removed, increasing power and speed. Prices for a new kart start at £2,500.

For those over 16, the Senior class beckons. The Rotax Max kart is the best option as it comes with a sealed 125cc engine. Expect to pay more than £3,000 for a new Rotax Max. Serious speed junkies should consider the Gearbox class. Stretching from 125cc to 250cc, and with top speeds reaching 150mph, the geared karts are like mini F1 cars and cost about £8,000 for the most potent versions. To view the classes in full, visit www.karting.co.uk/kandk/classes.html.

Karts to F1

Ayrton Senna
Senna was an early convert to karting. He was given his first 1hp kart when he was four but had to wait until his 10th birthday for his first full-size 100cc kart. At 13 he competed in his first race, won it and in 1977 and 1978 he won the South American kart championship

Fernando Alonso
The current F1 champion raced his first kart when he was three. Five years later he won his first Rookie class championship and he went on to become Spanish, European and world champion in higher classes

Michael Schumacher
Schumacher got around Germany’s age restriction of 14 on racing by getting his licence in Luxembourg when he was 12. He won the German junior kart championship in 1984 and 1985, and in 1987 he was crowned German and European kart champion before leaving to start racing in German Formula Ford

Jenson Button
Began at the age of eight when his father bought him his first kart. In 1991, only his second full season of racing, he won all 34 races of the British Cadet kart championship. Over the next five years he won every title he competed in. By 1997 he was the youngest ever winner of the Italian ICA senior karting series