Motivation, an international development charity, intend to produce a racing chair, trialled at March's International Athletics Meeting in Tunisia, costing under $1,000 (£618/€761) .

The charity, who set up sustainable projects to improve the quality of life for people with mobility disabilities in developing countries, already design low cost wheelchair tennis and wheelchair basketball chairs helping to increase grass roots participation in disability sport in poorer nations.

The next stage of fine tuning the racing chair's design involves a consultation exercise, via an online survey with wheelchair athletes, asking for comments on the size of the wheels, the push rim and its weight.

"We got such positive response straight away in Tunisia – we've never done a racing wheelchair before, but people were so complimentary of it," said Jason Williams, business development manager at Motivation.


"With this questionnaire, we want to get some more details.

"We can get that information from experts, but it's nice to have that large sample of data just to back up what individuals think, because it's a bit more objective than one person telling us how they think it should be."

To keep costs at a minimum, Motivation plans to provide four different sizes of wheelchair.

"Everybody in wheelchair racing will tell you that you should have a chair that is fitted to the individual,' continued Williams.

"But from where we're coming from that's not possible to do that and keep a very low cost.

"So what we need is to be able to decide on four sizes which will cover most people and give the most benefit to the largest group of people possible, so that's what the survey would help us with."

All wheelchair athletes are invited to take part in the confidential Motivation survey here. 

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