I remember the moment as if it was yesterday. Whilton Mill, pouring rain, cadet karting, end of the day. Harrison had just failed to make it out of a B Final after I had put the wrong setup on the kart. Again.
H was sitting slumped in the corner, completely fed up. Our little 3×3 awning somehow felt full of failure. I crouched down next to him, got my phone out and played him the famous Rocky speech about getting knocked down by life and having to keep moving forward.
I didn’t say anything while it played. We just sat there together, the film clip barely audible above the rain hammering on the canvas roof. When it finished, I hugged him and, after a moment, he hugged me back.
I said to him, “It won’t always be like this.”
Then we started possibly the worst job in motorsport, packing up a karting awning in the rain.
Maybe Harrison remembers that moment. I certainly do, because for years, I’ve beaten myself up about those karting days. We spent so much time doing it and seemed to have so little to show for it. I made mistakes, gave him some terrible setups and Karts. There were plenty of journey’s home when I wondered what on earth we were doing.
Fast-forward nine years to Anglesey and, strangely, some of those feelings came flooding back.
The team almost had to drag me out onto the pit wall to watch timed qualifying. I was horrible. H qualified seventh and suddenly all those old karting feelings seemed to swamp me. I was down about our position, grumpy as hell and generally being a proper pain in the backside. I even got a well-deserved telling-off from the team boss.
The ridiculous thing is that this was effectively the moment Harrison had won the championship. The mathematics meant that all he really had to do was start the race and the title was his. Yet there was me behaving as though the world had ended because we’d qualified seventh.
I look back now, with the championship standings published and Harrison’s name sitting at the top, and wonder why I made such a mess of what should have been such a great moment.
The contrast between my son and me could not have been greater. This year, every time H has had a difficult round, or something has gone against him, he has bounced back.
After his first win at Brands Hatch, Oulton was a tough weekend despite H being incredibly quick. At one point he set a lap more than half a second faster than anyone else, but poor starts, clashes and damage compromised the races, and the results didn’t reflect the pace he had. He then went to Silverstone and fought back with a win and two P2s, putting himself firmly back in the driving seat.
Then came Donington and two much harder races. Suddenly, at least to me, the championship looked like a much higher peak to climb. H didn’t seem to see it that way. He just got on with it.
Snetterton was the round of the season for me. H and Alex Ames were in a race of their own, and H came away with pole, a P1 and a P2. It was the response to Donington that struck me most. He hadn’t become cautious, he hadn’t started worrying about protecting what he had, and he certainly hadn’t given up. He bounced back harder.
By the time we headed to Wales, losing the championship was still mathematically possible, but realistically H had done the hard work.
Looking back now, I think Harrison took something from those karting years that perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Resilience.
Maybe somewhere inside him there is still some of the fury from all those days when his dad gave him another rubbish kart setup. The down-on-power engines, the bent sprockets, starting at the back, things breaking and things simply not working. I don’t know what has driven him during some of the races I’ve watched this year and perhaps I’ll never really know.
But I can still see the clenched fist of the little boy who was once told he should give up karting. I can remember the head-down determination before yet another recovery drive from the back. There was always passion there and there was always that desire to keep pushing.
A team boss once said something about Harrison that has stayed with me: “He simply never, ever gives up.”
They nailed it.
H was relentless in karting. Every setback went in and somehow something useful eventually came back out. We almost came to blows ourselves one horrible day at a circuit because we both desperately wanted to do better and things simply weren’t working. Eventually I stepped back, H pushed himself to another level and we carried on.
He found a way to learn and a way to improve. He kept moving forward.
Perhaps that’s the bit I’ve got wrong all these years. I’ve looked back at karting and thought about how little we had to show for it. Maybe I was measuring the wrong things.
Those years didn’t give Harrison a cabinet full of plastic trophies. They gave him something rather more useful. They taught him how to have a terrible day and come back the next morning. How to lose and still want to race. How to start at the back and fight forwards. How to deal with disappointment, how to work and, most importantly, how to keep going when it would have been much easier to stop.
This year has really been no different. There have been difficult weekends, mistakes, mechanical problems, contact and days when things haven’t gone to plan. The difference is that this time there is a championship table with number 75 sitting right at the top.
https://brscc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/FF-Final-Points.pdf
The official standings show Harrison first overall after a season in which he just kept finding a way.
Nine years ago, I crouched beside a miserable little boy in a wet awning at Whilton Mill and told him it wouldn’t always be like this.
I was right.
What I didn’t understand then was just how important all those days when it was like that would eventually become.
Nine years in the making.
2026 Super Classic Formula Ford Champion.
Harrison Morrow.
