Many car lovers remember when they first “drove” their parents’ car. Mine was “driving” my Dad’s 1970 MGB behind the Food World. My first time “driving” involved me sitting in his lap and “steering” the car. I was three. While that was thrilling, I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to drive the 100-hp MG, much less a nearly 1000-hp Ferrari, on a real rack track. Zayn Sofuoglu, a three-year-old, actually got to drive a Ferrari SF90 around a real race track. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done it.
Three-year-old drives Ferrari
Zayn Sofuoglu is the son of Kenan Sofuoglu, a Turkish motorcycle champion-turned-politician. I think it’s fair to go ahead and end the comparison of [insert general childhood memory of driving] and anything Zayn is up to.
For one thing, Zayn has over a million followers on his Instagram, which his father runs for him. Clearly, videos of this baby driving have made plenty of people upset. However, many people applaud Kenan for supporting and teaching his son good driving skills at an early age.
The other aspect of this situation is that this little boy isn’t driving a truck around the farm; he’s driving a 986-hp Ferrari worth half a million dollars around a race track. This isn’t the first high-powered supercar young Zayne has driven either. There are also Instagram videos of the boy driving a Mercedes-Benz EQS at his home, using the surround video feature to navigate the driveway because he couldn’t see out the window.
How young can you teach a kid to drive?
Racing drivers, stunt people, and other motoring enthusiasts often wrangle their kids in for a bit of fun. The late great Ken Block taught his daughter to drift and race at a young age. So young, in fact, that she began competing at 11 years old.
The Drive points out that while young Zayne might make many people nervous, his father is a skilled racer and raised him in go-karts. While he might be in the deep end now, he certainly started in the kiddie pool. When Zayne was just two years old, he was doing some pretty unbelievable things around the go-kart track.
The truth is, no matter anyone’s personal feelings about this young person driving, he isn’t doing it on public roads, which, frankly, closes the door on whether people who aren’t his family can weigh in. It is an interesting, uncomfortable situation to think through as a parent. On the one hand, your kid is learning valuable skills that will keep them and others safer on the road. However, it is clearly risky to teach a child so young something so dangerous.
Would you let your child drive on a closed track?
The truth is, most of us will never have to honestly answer that question because few people have the opportunity to do what young Zayne is doing here. The money and time needed to teach a child to do this sort of thing safely are too great for most people in the world. This is what makes the backseat parenting and judgments so easy. We can call it whatever we want from 50,000 feet away, but if I had the time and money to train my daughter this way, I can’t say I wouldn’t be tempted. Would you?
