Kiko Porto remembered the start in karting in Recife and the Brazilian title won in a year of hard work and with a great collective effort
Kiko Porto is the great Brazilian hope for the Road to Indy. At the age of 18, the Pernambuco native is the current USF2000 champion and competes for DE Force in Indy Pro 2000. Like most of the young talents in the country, his career started in karting. In an exclusive interview to GRANDE PRÊMIUM, the boy from Recife tells that motor racing quickly became a passion.
"I started when I was eight years old, at the time, in 2011 to be exact, I had just turned eight. I remember asking my father to introduce me to the people of karting. I used to see an indoor kart near the Recife airport and I was very curious," recalled Kiko.
"After insisting a lot, he even tried to go there, but there were no karts for children, and the only way he could give me this opportunity to have the first contact was with the professional karts. He took me for the first time and I liked it very much. From that point on, when I knew that this was something I could repeat several times and practice weekly, and then start racing, I never wanted to stop", said the driver from Pernambuco.
Porto's career really took off in 2016. After regional titles in championships in the northeast, he left to compete in the Brazilian karting championship. The driver will never forget the great collective effort made by everyone around him, which resulted in winning the title after a year of exhaustive work.
"I remember that 2016 was my second year in the Junior lower category, and we were, at each stage in 2015, able to learn more, evolve more. In 2016 we saw that it was a year to conquer things. It was a lot of work, I remember that it was one of the most hard working and exhausting years of my entire career. Every weekend, every week I was on the race track," said Kiko.
"So, it was a year when we said 'let's see what we can do, giving our best', not only from me, because I think that, for all this to work out, it was much more than my dedication, but also from the people who were with me. Since the people who took me to the track, the team's people, my family, the cook who stayed with me in the motorhome, so, it was an army of people with a single purpose", said the DE Force driver.
From then on, Porto went on to Glory in the United States, instead of trying to fight financially for a career in Europe. The driver from Pernambuco went on to win titles and is now the main name in Brazil on the road to Indy.