Aye there’s plenty to go at, and will be even more going forward now that the Sigma engine is no-more.
ETA: What Personally kept me to the “official” ladder was twofold. 1) I wanted to build a brand new kit car as part of this experience, and 2) having the reassurance that I was racing against a field of rookies was important to me. If you drop into 135 Sigma Caterham Graduates for instance, you can save a shed load of money by starting with a used car - but you could be in there with people who are on their tenth season as far as I know!
From what we’ve been told, next year’s Academy will be small capacity turbo engines, so will then launch a new “ladder”, but they’ll retain the existing Sigma ladders for as long as they can maintain the grids - so I’ll still get to upgrade mine to Roadsport, 270, 310, etc. There will then be a parallel ladder of Turbo cars which will gradually roll out as next years’ Academy progresses.
It really is an impressive operation that Caterham are running. Watching Darren and the technical team at the Brands weekend was great. Although unfortunate for the drivers, they repaired a couple of shunts and I think swapped three gearboxes over the weekend. The drivers typically only missing a session at the most…!
Be interesting to see how that operation scales this weekend as we have Academy, Roadsports, 270 and 310 all in the same paddock!
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Just wanted to say here, Kyle, that what you’ve achieved already (building your own Caterham, entering an actual race series, and finishing on the podium!!) is seriously awe-inspiring - you should be dead chuffed mate - I’m following along with great interest! 
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You have done amazingly, academy may be a “beginners” series but many of the drivers are far from beginners.
My experience of Academy cars is it’s the tyres that make them tricky to drive (deliberately). If you switch to Avon zzs (nova now) the car is much more “normal”.
The sigma engine in your car is great, I much preferred it to the 420 engine.
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Ah man! That was AMAZING right up until the moment - such incredibly close racing, you did fantastic mate! And to be honest, to get straight onto the circuit again and hold with everyone else was something else - I’d have been terrified some part of the suspension might’ve been coming off and wouldn’t have dared to push it. Well done mate!
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Yeah it was a real shame I couldn’t keep it going for another 2 minutes!
It’s funny, as part of the Academy we get given “optional” briefings during Friday testing, I say “optional” because if you attend them all, you get championship points! So they’re basically mandatory!!
The idea is, we review incident and footage from previous events and discuss things that aren’t always obvious to new racers. Safety car etiquette, etc.
For the Thruxton brief, the topic was “continuing with a damaged car” and we were shown some quite horrifying footage of cars continuing after an issue, then causing further chaos later. One such was a coming together of two cars, the “victim” car limps back to pits, the “offender” recovers a bit slower, and just sends it. His entire upright falls off right near the pit entry and he’s launched at great speed into the pitlane, missing the original victims pit entry by mere millimetres and narrowly avoiding t-boning the pit wall which could have been fatal.
None of that even remotely entered my head after having a little dingdong, car felt “fine”, so I just got on with it 
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Wow. That was entertaining.
The circuit looks in equal parts terrifying and exhilarating.
Excellent video and I do like your alter ego “voiceover Kyle”
He always sounds so miserable
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