Michael Caruso
Twenty five years in the sport, beginning with an Australian kart title in the 1990s. Caruso talks about what carried across into a professional touring car career, and what he had to unlearn.
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Swapping Paint is a series of long form conversations between David Sera and drivers who began their careers in karts. Each one traces the same journey: junior club racing, national titles, and the jump into cars. The point of the series is not nostalgia. It is to show families what the pathway actually looks like from the inside, and how much of it is decided in the kart years.
Alongside the interviews this page carries setup notes, race reports from Australian Kart Championship rounds, and the coaching tips Sera writes up after a training day when a problem keeps recurring across different drivers.
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Why the pathway matters
Every driver in this series started in a kart, and none of them arrived at the top by accident. The habits that decide a car racing career, reading a braking point, holding a line under pressure, managing tyres over a stint, are all formed years earlier at club level. That is the case Sera makes to the families he coaches, and it is why the SDD program insists on the fundamentals before anything else.
The same applies to the drivers currently in the squad. Several of the names on the SDD race team page are following the identical route, and a few have already made the move into cars.
If you want that grounding for your own driver, start with driver training, or read David Sera's own competition record.
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