The History of Karting

In August 1956, a race car fabricator named Art Ingels welded scrap tube around a surplus two-stroke in a Los Angeles garage and invented a sport. Seventy years later that sport crowns FIA world champions, fills grids on five continents and supplies effectively every driver on the Formula 1 grid. This section is the full story — verified, cross-referenced and told era by era.

Start with the eras. The arc runs from the 1956 invention and the sixties boom that gave karting a world championship, through the screaming 100cc golden age of Fullerton, Wilson and Senna, the 1990s money rush that made karting F1's official nursery, the failed KF experiment of the 2000s, and on to the modern era of OK racing, Mini 60 prodigies and F1 debuts at 17.

Then go deeper by class. Every formula that mattered has its own history here — from the OK class and the KZ gearbox categories to the single-make giants, Rotax Max and IAME X30, that quietly became the biggest racing series on earth.

Follow the power. The sport's politics live in its institutions: the CIK-FIA, karting's rule-maker since 1962, and WSK Promotion, the promoter that reshaped elite competition after 2006.

And meet the people. Our legends collection covers both kinds of great: the F1 icons who learned everything here — Senna, Schumacher, Verstappen — and the career karters, like six-time world champion Mike Wilson, who stayed and became the sport's own royalty.

History here is not nostalgia; it is context for the live rankings we publish every week. The next chapter is already on track.