WHEN two students asked Paul Bentley, owner of FASTSIGNS® in Hammersmith, to sponsor their go-kart, it didn’t take him long to say ‘yes’.

For this wasn’t any go-kart, this one runs on hydrogen and is breaking the boundaries of scientific engineering.

Paul was impressed. “They’d built this incredible machine and wanted to give their sponsors some publicity. So they asked me to do the signage,” he said.

FASTSIGNS Hammersmith specialises in producing signs and graphics, including vehicle graphics.

Paul continues: “I wouldn’t have given them beer money, but they knew what they were talking about, and the whole project had a good profile. We put the sponsors’ logos and our own all over the bodywork.”

The students were from Imperial College, just up the road from FASTSIGNS which is on Hammersmith Road, London.

There are 120 mechanical engineering graduates involved in the college’s Racing Green project to produce zero-emission vehicles.

So far they have built two go-karts. They came a respectable third when they raced in Rotterdam last year in the international Formula Zero Championships, the first international motorsport series in the world for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Paul has done go-karting in the past and might take up the students’ offer to have a go on a Racing Green machine in future.  

“They’re racing at Brand’s Hatch or Silverstone next. I might go and watch,” he said.

“I’m trying to cultivate them and get some branded flags and banners so they can wave them about in the pit. It would be good for them, and good for FASTSIGNS.”