[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:00:06] Mark Boudreau: You're listening to the Motorsport Prospects podcast.
Hey, it's Mark from Motorsport Prospects and welcome to the Motorsport Prospects podcast. This is where we dive into the world of motorsport with the people who live and breathe it. From driver coaches and sponsorship experts to team owners, pro drivers and more. You're going to hear real stories, practical advice, and that's really key, and insights you can actually use whether you're just starting out or already chasing success on the track.
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[email protected] so let's get started with this week's guest. My guest today is Lisalott Lauding. Lisalott is the head of Commercial at Future Lap, a talent intelligence platform that transforms verified race data into clear, comparable insights on emerging drivers.
Welcome to Motorsport Prospects. Liselott. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak to me.
[00:02:15] Liselott Lading: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:18] Mark Boudreau: It's been great and I've been following what you're doing, so I'm really excited that you're on the podcast, which, interestingly enough, we will go into my.
I don't know if I can call it famous, but I'll call it famous. My famous. One question, based on your experience and expertise as a motorsport professional, what would be the one most important piece of advice you could offer a current or aspiring race driver?
[00:02:45] Liselott Lading: Yeah, from my perspective, that would be to know that the scouting process is becoming more data driven than Ever in motorsports and the opportunities that that creates for someone to get noticed.
[00:03:02] Mark Boudreau: And it's, you know, it's interesting data.
The world is being consumed by data. We see it every day. So. And motorsport is in a lot of ways the perfect environment because it's so data driven.
[00:03:19] Liselott Lading: It's so data driven. However, and it's like really interesting because in other sports, such as like football, baseball, ice hockey, there are already talent identification platforms. They've been there for years and a scout would like naturally use those as a tool of their everyday.
However, in motorsports, although, like the top tier is like data driven from A to Z, once you get lower into the pyramid of the talent, yeah, just the talent sourcing, it's becoming less and less data driven. So take for example, after a weekend of karting competitions happening on international basis, the only way for you as a scout to get on top of that is to dive into different websites, go into horrible, I would say, PDFs of race results and, you know, try to find a way through the data. And many that I talk to, they have their own Excels where they're trying to pull in some statistics from that into their own systems. And, but I mean, if now that we're talking about in carting and F4, which are the environments that we cover in Future Lap, okay, we're talking about hundreds of carting events, we're talking about 20 or so series of Formula 4. There's no way a human being can actually be on top of that data. And to kind of like cross reference every driver across all the different metrics on that. And that's exactly like the market gap that Future Lap is filling. So this is a tool to help professionals to find young talent. But for the young talent, this means that they can be discovered in new ways through systems like Future Lap.
[00:05:23] Mark Boudreau: So this always comes up when they're in sports, when there's a discussion about analytics, there are the people that are absolutely analytics driven, period. And then there's the people that say analytics is an extremely important part of it, but it's just a part of it in that there is the other factor, which is the actual person behind the data.
So for, so are they, you know, I always use the term, are they a hustler? Do they, you know, do they work hard? Are they consistent? So how does that fit into what you're doing at Future Lap?
[00:05:58] Liselott Lading: Yeah, so I mean, a scout should definitely be at the tracks, watch the drivers, talk to the families, you know, all of that. But that is qualitative work where they should really spend their time, what they should not spend their time on is as I was saying, like every Monday go to, through all these websites and download the data and you know, so, so that's the thing, that's the thing that we are solving for the scouting industry in motorsports is to get that data at your fingertips. And what I think that that will mean for the young drivers is that it will be possible to be noticed even if you may not be in, you know, in this.
So every scout has their own, let's call it view field. Right. They have the competitions that they are fond of, they have the geography geographies where they Normally travel to, etc.
And that narrows somewhat the, well, the talent that they actually can discover.
[00:07:06] Mark Boudreau: Right.
[00:07:07] Liselott Lading: But with Future Lap you get this like you get the full view of everything happening in Karting and F4 and you can cross reference drivers and compare them on like on data points that have been neutralized.
[00:07:26] Mark Boudreau: Oh, okay, yes.
[00:07:27] Liselott Lading: So that means that as a driver, if, I mean, it will always be important to have a big network and who you know, etc. But maybe, I mean the vision of this is that we would give someone a chance that wouldn't other have been noticed because they might lack the exact right contacts or you know, they might not come from the specific locations where everyone else is from, etc. So it's more for the coaches, they will use it, or scouts and coaches, they will use it to find that early talent.
But for the driver, they should know that this is now an opportunity for them. So even though they might not, it's not, it's like giving more hope to more people that they can be discovered through data driven apps and, and systems like Future Lap.
[00:08:21] Mark Boudreau: It's, I don't want to use the cliche, but it's democratizing.
[00:08:24] Liselott Lading: Yeah.
[00:08:26] Mark Boudreau: The talent and, and in a lot of ways it would make a talent scout more efficient.
[00:08:31] Liselott Lading: Absolutely. So that's where it comes in. Because also with people like Kimi Antonelli in F1 now, we can see that the scouts are looking into maybe even younger kids.
So it's like, and again, it's impossible as a human being to be on top of all of that data.
So therefore when the data is pulled in from these PDFs, from all of those hundreds of websites into one system in a normalized way, you can start to look at graphs on how drivers are doing on different metrics over time. You can compare that and overlay it with other drivers. So you become, as a scout, you become much more data Driven in your way of identifying talent, but that is not replacing your job. That's just making the first part of it easier. Right. The, the, everything else is the same of then going out to the track, see how they bounce back from a bad qualifying or how they, I don't know, how they talk to the people around them, etc. Etc. All of that is of course standard. So that's what AI and Data cannot do.
[00:09:50] Mark Boudreau: Yes, yeah, and that's a great point. It's a good baseline for building off of and then actually talking to the person, well, as a person and observing them, you know, how they deal with pressure and all that kind of stuff.
Tell me a little bit about your. So your, your relationship with More Than Equal.
[00:10:09] Liselott Lading: Yeah, so Future Lap is born out of More Than Equal. And for those who don't know what More Than Equal is, it's a non for profit organization trying to find the first female Formula one champion.
It was founded by David Coltheart and the Czech entrepreneur Caleb Komarek.
So those two founded this and they More Than Equal, they run a driver development program where they take in young female drivers and well, give them every support that they might need in order to reach the top.
And Future Lap came from when More Than Equal was founded.
I mean, one of the first questions were like, okay, so who are the young female drivers out there that we should support?
And More Than Equal needed this system to identify because they wanted to look globally, they wanted to look in like many different karting competitions and F4. So you know, they wanted to have a real broad view of where they were searching for talent to make sure that they weren't like, I don't know, stuck in certain geographies or in, in certain specific competitions. So it actually came out of the need for More Than Equal. And then I think it's a timing thing too because I spoken to some like real seniors in motorsports and when someone said like, oh, you're doing this now. I've been trying for so many years.
So how have you done it? So I think many people have tried to do what we're doing with Future Lap, but it was probably at the exact timing of how developed AI is, that was our lucky shot because again, PDF is like really, it's a horrible format for a computer.
[00:12:04] Mark Boudreau: Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:12:05] Liselott Lading: So I mean a computer doesn't understand what is in a PDF. So that's why previous, when, when the data has been stored out in PDFs, there was no way of doing anything more analytical about it or data driven about it. But now with how AI has developed, it was a timing thing too.
So the need. So when we started to pull in all the data to, to find the female young drivers, of course as a side effect, we got all the drivers, also the male drivers.
So then we started to realize once we started to sort the data into, okay, this is national competitions, I want to filter out who I'm looking for in age, or I want to filter by geography, or I want to filter, you know, which competition level they are on, etc. Once we started to put all those filters into the data, we started to see like, hey, this is a really powerful tool.
This should be something bigger than Only for More Than Equal. And that's when we decided to commercialize it, which we did in March, in this year, 2026 in the motorsports BlackBook Forum in London.
[00:13:17] Mark Boudreau: Right, yeah. And what other. Do you have any other partnerships that Future Lap is involved with?
[00:13:25] Liselott Lading: Yeah, so I mean, we come from both More Than Equal and Future Lap. We come from the same company group as Allwyn, which is an F1 sponsor.
So we, that's our like home.
And since the launch, we have now onboarded, well, a handful of customers to Future Lap including two F1 teams, two Formula Series and like professional agents.
So we have quite a broad, I would say now, customer base that are on the early, well, the early Adopter license, let's call it that, which is now then transforming into hopefully longer subscriptions going forward.
[00:14:18] Mark Boudreau: Wow, perfect.
And so by the way, for anybody listening, all the links will be in the show notes to Future Lap and More Than Equal, just so that if you want more information.
So this is really exciting and you know, it's interesting because in the debate about AI, I always like to say, and this is a great example of it, AI is not always evil.
No, you know, I can be used for, for good and productive purposes. And this is a perfect illustration of that. So it's very, it's very cool.
Very excited to, to hear about this.
[00:15:02] Liselott Lading: Yeah. Someone said that instead of creating biases with AI, we're actually removing biases with AI because this is what, you know, from our perspective, what we do is to give everyone a fair chance to be spotted and that will then hopefully increase the base of who can be, who can be spotted, who can be noticed.
[00:15:26] Mark Boudreau: Absolutely. I'm really excited and looking forward to seeing how you progress actually both More Than Equal and Future Lap.
[00:15:33] Liselott Lading: Then maybe if we can just jump back to all the things that you can do in Future Lap. So I was mentioning Kimi Antonelli and him being quite young now in the F1 environment.
In future lab we have data going back to 2021 and as a matter of fact he was actually in karting by then.
Which means that what we're aspiring to do is to find the answer to the question like what does it take to be a good driver at each stage of your development?
And by having historical data on some really, really good drivers, we can start to benchmark current drivers against the same patterns as those drivers.
Again, this exists already in other sports. So other sports they would know what, I don't know how, how long you would have to throw a ball at at the age of 8 to be good at baseball, for example, or how fast you need to skate in, in ice hockey to be at the age of 10 to be in the top later, etc, etc in motorsports this doesn't exist. It's more of gut feeling and hunches and you see talent in someone.
But we're really looking to find the answer to those data driven questions and by that we hope to actually be able to transform quite a bit the whole talent id. It's both about finding the hidden gems, the diamonds in the dirt, but it's also maybe to be able to in a data driven way, tell someone you don't have to spend your family's money, you know, in a gentle way. That's right. You know, you're not making, you're not quite making the mark.
[00:17:22] Mark Boudreau: So it's, it's, it's very similar to data analysis of, of, of a lap or of a race when you're reviewing that. Yeah, and I love that because so many times the advice you'll hear, the standard advice is before you, any series that you start in first year you learn, second year you dominate.
[00:17:43] Liselott Lading: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Mark Boudreau: Doesn't really tell you a whole heck of a lot about what that means and what the approaches should be and where you should work on and what you. So this, this and the normalizing I think is really important.
[00:17:56] Liselott Lading: Yeah.
[00:17:56] Mark Boudreau: So I really, I really like normalizing.
[00:17:59] Liselott Lading: What is interesting too is that you can actually compare people competing in totally different championships or in totally different carts, for example, different engines. Because what we do is that we do have the data.
We say instead of showing the single fastest lap time in number, you can see that too, of course. But what we do is that we show how far off are you in percentage from the actual fastest lap time in that race. Which means that if you have a kid in one competition on a certain engine and you have another kid In a totally different part of the world doing something different still, you can compare on how many percentages they are away from the single fastest lap time, for example. So it means that you can start to cross reference and compare drivers that are doing totally different because you're more looking into the patterns than. I mean, the actual data is there. You can see the raw data if you want to, but the patterns are giving away way and showing the true characteristics of a driver.
[00:19:09] Mark Boudreau: Right. And I've always said context is really important when you're looking at data.
[00:19:14] Liselott Lading: Yeah.
[00:19:15] Mark Boudreau: You know, and you need to understand what the context is of that data itself in order to make sense of what it is.
[00:19:23] Liselott Lading: And that's where the expertise of the scout comes in and what we will never be able to replace with a system we don't intend to either. So, you know, that's exactly to know what you're looking at and to be able to interpret that in the right way and say, you know, just have the context. Just as you're saying that is your expertise as the scout.
[00:19:47] Mark Boudreau: Right. No, this is great. And like I said, all of these links will be mentioned in the show notes. Future Lap is. It's an exciting development and you're right, it is a very 2026 development. It's so. But. But it's definitely needed. And I'm, like I said, I'm really excited to see how this, how this transpires. So I have a final question to ask you before I let you go.
Yeah. And that is what is your favorite racetrack, either current or historical?
[00:20:24] Liselott Lading: Oh, I think I would say Zandwort.
Me being in Sweden, this is the one who is like, I guess, easiest to get to.
And then just. Doesn't it sound like a fast car sun word. It sounds like you're.
I just like it.
[00:20:43] Mark Boudreau: And it's got that, that, that banked turn.
[00:20:47] Liselott Lading: Exactly.
[00:20:49] Mark Boudreau: Yeah, no, no, that, that, that is cool. And it's in a great area. I mean, you know, you're right on the beach, so. Very cool. Well, I really appreciate the time, Lisa lot. It was, it was great.
Very informative. And for those of you that are listening and are wondering about data, how does that fit in and that intersection of data and the human part of it, I think.
And I hope you got some answers from this because I certainly did.
So, yeah. Thanks so much for appearing. And that's it for this week. This is Mark from Motorsport Prospects reminding you to stay fast, stay focused and keep chasing that checkered flag.
Thanks for listening to the Motorsport Prospects podcast. For insights, advice and the latest news racers can use, visit motorsportprospects.com.
