Champions of the Future: The FIA Karting Dress Rehearsal

The smartest idea in modern karting promotion was almost embarrassingly simple: run a top-level race on the same circuit as the next FIA Karting round, days or weeks before it. Whoever wants to win the European Championship now has to race Champions of the Future first — and everyone does.

Origins

Champions of the Future was created in 2020 by the RGMMC Group, an event promoter established in 2004 with a long record in international karting. Launched into the chaos of a pandemic-compressed season, the series offered exactly what teams craved: extra competitive mileage at the venues that mattered, sanctioned by FIA Karting and run to the same sporting template.

The first champions set the tone for what the series would become. Nikita Bedrin took the inaugural OK crown and Arvid Lindblad — later a Red Bull junior — won OK-Junior. Rafael Câmara added the 2021 OK title, Alex Powell won in 2023, and in 2024 Luna Fluxá became the first female champion in the series, winning the OK-N class.

How it shaped karting

Champions of the Future turned the pre-event test into a championship of its own. Its impact shows in three ways:

• Grid quality: because it previews FIA Karting venues — 18 circuits have featured, including Zuera, Portimão, Genk, Franciacorta and Valencia — every works team enters with its full line-up. The fields are effectively European Championship grids.
• Class expansion: from an OK/OK-Junior core, the platform has grown to cover all eight CIK classes, adding KZ, KZ2 and Masters shifter racing plus OK-N, OKN-Junior and Mini divisions across its Euro Series, Shifters and Academy strands.
• A second data point: scouts no longer judge a driver on one FIA weekend. The COTF result at the same track, against the same rivals, either confirms or exposes it — and teams treat the series as a live laboratory for set-up and engine choices before the points that count.

Alongside WSK Promotion's Italian winter programme, RGMMC's series completed the modern career template: WSK for pre-season form, Champions of the Future for championship rehearsal, FIA Karting for the title itself.

Today

The series is now a fixture of the international season, with the concept exported to America as Champions of the Future America. Its OK and OK-Junior finals remain the deepest non-FIA direct-drive races of the year, and its shifter rounds have become genuine form guides for the KZ world title fight.

You will find every Champions of the Future round in our calendar, weighted just below FIA Karting championship events in our model. The results move the OK, OKJ and KZ2 rankings sharply — a COTF win at a European Championship venue is one of the strongest predictors in our data that a world-title run is coming. Track the contenders in our driver profiles.