Kart Chaser: meet the show runner Xander Clements

Xander is 27, from near Atlanta—in the U.S. South—and his background includes karting as a driver, with no family racing heritage, but also Bachelor's in Business Administration, plus a burning passion for storytelling and communication. The founder of Kart Chaser reminds us of those Silicon Valley prodigies that the rest of the world looks at like stubborn genius that finally made their way - "these things only happen in America." kind of things.

Today's karting world looks at Kart Chaser as a unicorn, in the land where our sport was born after all, while clones of the format try to emerge -with little success- everywhere, and even the FIA has drawn inspiration from it, as evident in the interview formats and storytelling in general over these years, with one substantial difference...

Tell me about the origins of the project: when did your interest in media begin, and in particular, explain the American karting landscape you navigated at the start. We know that in the USA, karting doesn't have a single format - how did you turn this variety into a strength for your storytelling?
It depends where you may want to draw the line of media interest, I suppose. Like most American kids interested in racing who grew up in the 2000s, my first exposure to motorsport came from watching NASCAR races with my dad. Birthday and Christmas presents were often diecasts from the Cup Series, and my first ‘content’ produced was a stop motion animation with my collection when I was 8 years old. Funny enough, the video still lives on with an absolutely silly view count of 11k!

In a way, if I take a look back at the last twenty years of my life, it almost feels pre-destined to be doing what I’m doing now. But, if I’m honest, the real belief and vision for Kart Chaser probably began when I was 15/16 years old. I was spending every weekend that I couldn’t afford to race working in any capacity in karting: coaching, officiating, and most notably, commentating. Much like the international scene in Europe, the ‘traveling circus’ of the majority of karting teams and drivers in the US race across a handful of championships and races, ultimately comprising a 15-17 race weekend season, depending how you slice it.

Xander Clements at the Supernationals with Luke Austin (Alpha Live co-founder), Kyle Cuthbertson, and Grace Overbeck (Head of Content and Kart Chaser team member)

Being so entrenched in it all – much like the racers, teams, officials, etc. – it came naturally for me to see it through a lens that blended it all together as one overall season. Over the years of explaining it, I try to break it down like this. We’ve essentially got 3 segments to our ‘Pro National’ Season: The Winter Season – January - March SKUSA Winter Series x 2 weekends Rotax Max Challenge Winter Trophy x 2 weekends Essentially, this is the ‘pre-season’ – not every team or driver attends every round of any of the three championships, and instead they’ll view these races as tune-ups. The Regular Season – March - September SKUSA Pro Tour x 3 weekends Stars Championship Series x 4 weekends US Pro Kart Series x 4 weekends New for this year, the RMC America’s Trophy Series x 2 weekends Rotax US Trophy Final x 1 weekend IAME USA Grand National Championship x 1 weekend I like to view this one as our ‘all-star’ race – non-points, big prizes, and a fun weekend with an unorthodox format Our ‘Super Bowl’ or ‘Indy 500’ – November SKUSA SuperNationals There’s certainly more to it than that, and equally more series on the horizon like the Champions of the Future Americas Series in it’s first year, along with ROK Cup USA’s program of a Winter Championship and their big one-off, ROK Vegas, that many teams and drivers use as a tune-up weekend for SuperNats.
I often joke that there’s probably no one who has watched more karting races in the US more than I have in the last ten – edit: probably fifteen now! – years. I think the raw, on-track product has a lot of unique selling points to it.

You can usually see either most or the entire track as a spectator, something only oval racing offers. The race distances are relatively short, something noteworthy for when it comes to attracting younger eyes. And finally, one of my favorite selling points: In most car races, the leader is able to get away by the end of the race, and rarely do you get a last-lap, last-corner, ‘buzzer-beater’ finish. In karting, the opposite is typically true.

We need to take a step back at this point: why karting? Were you a driver? In which categories and at what level? Did anyone in your family race? Often, especially in your part of the world, racing is a family legacy…
As early as elementary school, I was begging my parents to get into any form of racing I could find. Karting, Bandoleros and Legend Cars, Quarter Midgets – if it had 4 wheels, an engine, and a category for kids, I had a powerpoint pitch deck to my parents including everything I thought we needed to know and how to get into it.
But, my parents had no ties to anything racing-related beyond being fans: my mom worked in IT, and my dad was an English major. My journey into motorsports truly came from the online world. I made a number of those stop motion videos until I was about 11, connecting with other kids who were doing the same through an old YouTube chatroom feature – funny enough, called YouTube Streams. When YouTube ended the short-lived feature, we kept our community going through Skype, and eventually we all got into sim racing. I was the youngest of the bunch, but somehow I ended up as the leader of our league when we launched it. I streamed the races on twitch, raced periodically, officiated them, and organized the dates and schedule.

Simultaneously, my real-life racing began at the nearby indoor karting center when they added a Junior division. After winning the championship and making racing friends close to home, we took a step back for a year, saved our money, and attended a local race at Lamar County Speedway in Barnesville, Georgia, where we ran into one of the families who we met at the indoor leagues. Knowing that we had a friend already in the sport and being in a better financial spot than years earlier gave my dad the confidence to buy my first kart when I was 12: an American-made Razor Chassis with a ‘Clone’ engine – a 6.5 horsepower motor from China that had a small following in the United States before the Briggs & Stratton 206 engine came into play. In the same vein, as my transition from indoor karting to club racing, my path from club racing to national racing was assisted heavily from friends, in this case, my sim racing leagues. I met a number of karters through there, some of whom are still some of my closest friends to this day.
And that was huge, because while we were in a spot where we could get into karting at the local level financially, we were never going to be able to do more than a couple of races a year even with fully cutting out our club racing schedule.

Still wanting to be involved as much as I could in motorsports, that led me to getting a job at Atlanta Motorsports Park when I was 16, working independently at race weekends as an announcer, a driver coach, and an official. I spent as much time as I could volunteering to help at my team’s shop in Georgia when I lived there, and then when I took a full-time opportunity to work as the Assistant Manager at AMR Homestead-Miami Motorplex when I was 18, I still spent nearly every vacation day I had doing one or all of the above. Through all of that, I was able to get a few more race weekends in than I would have otherwise, in equipment and categories I had no business competing in, financially.
I was able to rack up a few club race wins over the years, a lone US Pro Kart Series podium in X30 Pro, and a couple of 100cc – first Yamaha then KA100 Senior podiums as well. But, when you’re limited on seat-time, and trying to punch well above your weight class, you’re only going to get to do so well. If I’m honest, had we had a healthy club grid at each age group in Georgia, I think my dad and I would have been perfectly happy staying at that level. But, all of those experiences have led me to where I’m at now and what I’m doing, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

The Kart Chaser project is supported by a wide range of stakeholders, including karting circuits, teams, and manufacturers, all recognizing that promoting the sport is a shared responsibility across the entire karting community. The resulting product has even set a benchmark for FIA Karting

Like many innovative projects, Kart Chaser was born and grew during the pandemic: what do you see as the main ingredients of its success?
Well, technically, Kart Chaser was slated to debut – far from its current form – on the weekend the pandemic shut us down in the US! This would have been mid-March at the SKUSA Pro Tour’s opener in New Orleans. That race was cancelled Friday afternoon, along with the rest of the country. KC didn’t actually get its start until karting began again at the end of the summer, with the first two weekends of August, on the backside of the pandemic.
While we certainly missed the boat a bit with TikTok’s added boost from 2019 thru 2020, along with digital media altogether, by not existing before or during the pandemic, but inversely, I got extremely lucky. I had been planning to go out on my own since January of 2020, after spending months and months contemplating what to do next. But, my apartment lease in Miami ran through to the end of July 2020, so I gave my bosses a ‘6-month notice’. Rather than firing me or being hostile in any way, they let me stay, giving me a consistent paycheck through to the end of July, which was right when karting events got back underway. Had I been able to start in January, with a plan of working in various positions at race weekends to make ends meet, the story of Kart Chaser probably would have been much, much shorter!
In terms of our success, though, there are countless factors I could rattle off. For one, the US Karting community, from teams, to families, to series owners and track owners, have been supportive to unimaginable degrees. The list of individuals to thank for their help in our journey is endless, and yet, it seemingly grows by the day.
I did a ton of studying on the marketing and trajectories of various sports and entertainment platforms before I ever began. Equally, I did as much homework as I could to see why similar projects weren’t able to be successful in the past.
Most of all though, the credit goes to our team. The work ethic and passion we all have for motorsport keeps us pushing to be better each week, each day, than the last.
Someone certainly could come along and try to best everything we’ve done with more expertise, more knowledge, more money, but if there’s one thing I’m certain on: Our team will beat the absolute brakes off of anyone who wants to try and out-work us. (Figuratively speaking, of course)

In what ways, and specifically in what aspects, do you believe Kart Chaser elevates karting as a sport in itself, rather than just presenting it as a stepping stone to car racing?
There are obviously a lot of strong opinions on this topic. In my opinion, the answer is that it’s both. More importantly, though, I think that the argument – of what karting is or isn’t – is a waste of time.
We believe in trying to show, not tell. Rather than giving a full-on lecture while commentating a race as to why karting is great, I’d rather paint a picture with my words to let you come to that belief on your own! The same goes with our social media channels, our broadcast production, and our own internal meetings. There’s more than enough substance within the sport to promote without needing to lean on outside factors. But also, we have no problem promoting kids who have used karting as a launching pad to get to cars. I’d consider it ‘low-hanging fruit-’. It’s easy to do, usually punches pretty far in regards to exposure, and doesn’t take a lot of effort. I also classify posting crashes in this same category.
But I think low-hanging fruit is probably not the best description – it’s more like candy. It gives you a temporary high, but after a bit of time, you almost feel more hollow than before. Because doing either of these doesn’t actually garner you an audience. It just gives you an audience on that specific post or type of post: an audience who follows F1, or an audience who likes to watch crashes. And you won’t convert that audience. Most will only return to your content if you feed them with what they originally found you posting.

Karting pages won’t gain or foster a community by posting Lando Norris throwbacks; you’re just going to get a bunch of likes and comments on a singular post from Lando’s fanbase. They’ll only return if you’re talking about Lando – they won’t stick around because you generically tell them the next Lando is in your ranks.
Just as I mentioned above – hard work is what it takes to make anything succeed. We’ve avoided falling into the trap of just doing ‘candy’ posts. We’ve worked hard to make engaging content and a universe that can stand on its own two feet.

How does your media balance the sport's dual nature: a pathway to cars for a few, but a mass sport for many?
One thing we have never done, is sold coverage on our social media channels. That’s allowed us to be more experimental than most – and to play to the tune of the audience. Equally, the analytics and data you can get from live broadcasts is extremely in-depth, and if you’re willing to let the data guide you, you’re practically guaranteed to succeed.
No different than how the algorithms work for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms, our goal is simple: we want you consuming Kart Chaser content, and becoming entrenched in following what goes in in the ‘Kart Chaser Universe’. The stream data tells us that at American National races – the SKUSA Winter Series and Pro Tour, the US Pro Kart Series, the US Rotax events, the IAME Grand Nationals, and the Stars Championship Series, the following facts:

Senior categories see a 20-25% boost in viewership over all other classes when all other variables are the same (total # of entries in the category)
Kids classes – Micro / Mini / Junior – are all relatively equal in views, significantly less than Senior categories, but significantly more than Masters categories. From the start, we’ve played to our strengths, promoting the senior classes primarily. It allowed us to Limit the number of names and faces casual viewers would have to learn and remember
Go deeper – a mile deep and an inch wide, instead of the other way around
Indirectly promote growth in all classes, as these drivers are at the top of the sport’s pyramid Give kids another reason to want to race karts in Senior before jumping over to cars, by wanting to get into the spotlight Thankfully, karting is far from the only motorsport discipline in the world that is used as a ‘pit stop’ in one’s journey to somewhere else. So there are a lot of great references as how to correctly, and incorrectly, promote it as such. Mazda does a great job with their MX-5 Cup Series in the US. It’s a ladder series on the path to the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship, but you’ll never hear or see them promote it as such. In fact, they’re almost a bit too obnoxious in trying to ‘tell’ you that the MX5 Cup is its own series, rather than showing you. But, the proof is in the pudding: their grid counts are tremendous.
The zMax CARS Late Model Tour, specifically the Late Model Stock division, is another great ‘ladder’ series. But go look at its website and social channels – it’s promoted as its own series.

Inversely, the NASCAR ARCA Menards Series has been struggling for a long-time. the F4 US and Formula Regional Americas have also struggled. The Road to Indy Series has showed strong in recent years, but it struggled for many years before that when they shifted the USF2000 and Star Mazda series towards exclusively being ‘ladder’ series.
In the modern world, anyone is able to see both the right and wrong way to promote smaller disciplines of motorsport, you just have to be willing to look. We are always ‘studying’ and looking to see if there’s something to be learned or taken away from our findings.

What aspects of communication from other sports (motorsport and beyond) have inspired you?
There are many. Some examples that I enjoy bringing up are the more ‘subtle’ changes Liberty did with F1 before they did Drive to Survive. They somewhat ‘pressured’ the teams to picking different colors of the rainbow for the sake of brand identity, and then they infused that into the TV and social graphics. It would’ve been pretty hard for a new-age, casual F1 fan to grasp the concept of McLaren-Mercedes being grey and Mercedes being grey in the 2000s! They also threw drivers faces onto the garage stalls nameplates. Those used to just be team logos. Why are these important changes? Sports are driven by fans. You gain fans by giving people a reason to root for one competitor, or against another. You don’t have to do that by pushing a narrative or drama. Sometimes, it can be as simple as seeing another human’s face and thinking ‘he/she looks like me’, or a team or driver whose primary color is your favorite color. There is also this quote I like from Paul Levesque, also known as ‘Triple H’ in the WWE World, from a documentary on the WWE. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something along the lines of, “We’re not even really a wrestling company – what we do is we create superheroes and supervillains, and then we have them clash.” And to me, that’s about as simple as you can explain sports.
The only difference is just that you have characters in varying shades of grey, rather than black-and-white like in the movies or tv shows.
The goal of what we do is to try and uniquely show our audience the major ‘characters’ (drivers) and who they are. Then, they can pick someone to root for or root against, which gives them a reason to watch!

Kart Chaser’s channels primarily focus on adult drivers, who become iconic reference points for the racing audience — whether that audience consists of other drivers or passionate karting enthusiasts

What are Kart Chaser's numbers? How many full-time employees does it have, how many collaborators, and what's the level of national event coverage? What's its business model, and why have so many companies decided to support it?
We’ve got a pretty massive roster of active employees, upwards of 60+ in total. Around 10 of those are truly full-time, and about another 10-20 are pseudo full-time, working a very consistent calendar with us. That’s a mix of on-site crew at various race weekends, remote work during race weekends, and mid-week remote work. There’s a lot of plates spinning at any given day for us. Our model is similar to others in a way, with a monthly subscription element. We also have advertising dollars, and then a baseline budget from each event promoter / series we work with for the broadcast weekend costs. By being able to work on bringing in other streams of revenue, we’re able to keep costs low for the event promoter, while also make investments in ourselves whenever we’d like to. We spend thousands of dollars each month just on research and development, completely unrelated to the actual operations.

Explain how effective communication boosts sales in karting. Why is it important to communicate well, and why should karting promote itself more than the ambition of transitioning to cars?
How does a system that rewards drivers with cash (often spendable on budgets for future seasons) work better—and build driver loyalty—than one that just hands out a tin cup trophy? From 2019-2020, I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking on what direction I wanted to take next with my life. Specifically, I wanted to pinpoint what truly got me out of bed in the morning. I boiled it down to two key goals:
For the 8-year old me:
Create more or enlarge local racing communities across the country. I saw firsthand in my travels over the years the long-lasting friendships that my long-distance friends had made with kids and adults they had met through karting, even though one or both parties may no longer be racing. I didn’t have a ton of friends growing up locally, as no one that I knew was really into racing. I think if I had been lucky enough to have a booming club karting scene nearby, that would have been different, and I would’ve really enjoyed that.
For the 15-year old me:
Create more opportunities for drivers with passion, talent, and work ethic, to continue to get to race, in whatever discipline that may be.
The second aspect could be any form of racing, of course. But in all of my studies, I struggled to think of ways that I could accomplish this.
On paper, Formula 1 teams should be funding more drivers now than ever before, since they’re making more money than ever before with the current boom. However, the opposite has occurred. The demand to become an F1 driver has increased, and so has the average cost to secure a seat at all levels of the ladder, and even the first few years in Formula 1. Inversely, sports car racing appears to be the most lucrative landscape when it comes to the number of salary-driver opportunities, and the size of those salaries.
In IMSA, the manufacturers actually pay to put the series on TV in the US, not the other way around.
So why are they spending the money? Simply put, they see value in competing to win on Sunday, in hopes of increasing consumer car sales on Monday.
With nearly every minor league car racing series trending towards spec-cars - in the US – Mazda MX-5 Cup, Toyota GR Cup, Ford Mustang Cup, Ferrari Challenge, etc. – the manufacturers have no reason to hire a talented driver to win; they already have the whole field covered.
And in the current world, advertising dollars can now be spent much more effectively than buying space on a racecar. The cost to go racing has continued to increase as technology has evolved. Income down, expenses up. So, if the only self-sustaining environment for a racing discipline to have somewhat of a meritocracy, is to have manufacturers competing against one other, where the impact on their sales after a race or championship concludes is significant enough to justify running a race team at a loss, then that narrows down my options. Karting, however, remains as one of those.

We have chassis brands competing to sell chassis on Monday. We have engine manufacturers competing to sell engines in open-mfg classes. We do have different tire brands, and in previous eras, we had open tire rules also. There’s an opportunity here.

Couple that with the fact that unlike other racing series, our outside revenue is essentially $0. No TV or Streaming profits, no fans, no outside sponsors because of those first two factors – solely participant funding. If we could increase exposure to those who win on Sunday, so much to the point that it sees a boost in that brand’s sales in the aftermath, we could – in theory – create an ecosystem that financially rewards those who win. And so, from day one, that has been a pillar of our promotion. Do whatever we can to increase the number of eyeballs watching and cheering for or against drivers, teams, and brands, and hopefully have a positive impact on sales for those who win at the major events we broadcast.
We use colors to distinguish chassis brands on our TV leaderboard and various graphics at national events. We also display team logos next to a driver whenever and wherever possible. And we’ve both heard and seen the impact that has had on the teams and manufacturers who have experienced success.
Equally, we’ve been able to make serious strides in expanding the pool of total drivers in the US, boosting participation in the series we broadcast, and gradually grown our audience to exceed just immediate friends and family of the participants by making it entertaining and engaging to watch.

Thinking about your work in the USA and karting in Europe: what aspects make you feel most free as a content creator, entrepreneur in karting, and motorsport enthusiast? Have you ever considered what a Kart Chaser might look like in Europe or in more strictly sanctioned environments? Can the rules of the sport ultimately influence how it's told? To wrap up: in Europe, karting positions itself in communication by emphasizing its tight link to F1. In the USA, the impression is that karting thinks more about "itself," its community, and the driver's experience in karting—making it a destination, not just a tool to reach car racing. Can you sum up how these two different visions affect how those who tell the sport work (and create)?
US Karting certainly still has ample drivers using it to launch up the ladder to cars. I think by not pigeon-holing ourselves to be exclusively that makes it a more welcoming community when viewed from the outside. I can’t speak personally on what the atmosphere feels like in a European karting paddock, as I have only been in one a handful of times. But those who have experienced it at length, when they’ve come to the US, they tell me that it feels more ‘up-beat’ over here.
I think that comes from the focus being on the here and now. When it’s only viewed as a ‘means’ to an end, I can imagine it can feel a bit grim. From the outside, it seems to me that European karting at all levels is simply operated at the mercy of the car series connected to the various organizations/ASNs. I don’t think anyone enjoys being viewed as just a ‘cog in the machine’, and/or not being able to influence growth in their own world.

Our series, tracks, teams, media, and other stakeholders are constantly asking ourselves, ‘what can be improved?’. And it’s not just ourselves asking that hypothetically, but we are actively taking chances to make changes and see if they make a difference. We’ve modified and experimented with race weekend formats. We’ve revised and grown our prize packages. We’ve collaborated on our calendars – even across series or ‘party’ lines, to make traveling across an entire continent more sustainable than ever before.
On paper, we shouldn’t be doing nearly as good as we are currently. Our economy isn’t doing the best at the moment. We’ve got some massive tariffs that have squeezed profit margins on businesses. We’re long past the post-pandemic boom of outdoor sports. And yet, here we are, in 2026, with healthy grids, positive momentum, and still showing growth in nearly every sector.

What's Kart Chaser's main feature for 2026, and what are the plans for the coming years?
Outwardly, our goals for this year are to continue to grow our reach and overall audience. With our model being so heavily reliant on advertising dollars, it’s important that we can continue to grow the number of eyes consuming our content. I want to continue pushing towards bringing in outside-of-karting advertisers, especially, as that’s the only way our sport will truly grow. Inwardly, we will continue to work on improving our product, as we always have been. We’re learning more each and every week on how to be more efficient in our processes, more effective in our promotion, and more entertaining in both our production quality and our storytelling.

It’s hard to put a true projection as to what the coming years will entail. I will say that ur mission of growing viewership of the sport will remain as our guiding light, and that it includes in-person viewership also. Karting produces phenomenal racing, and as cool as it’s been to bring that to everyone’s living rooms and mobile devices, we also want to bring people to come out to the track and experience it in person!