OK: The Direct-Drive Bloodline

Every generation of karting has had one class that decides who the best driver on the planet is. Since 1964 that class has run without a gearbox — and, for most of its life, without a clutch. The name on the entry list has changed four times. The job description never has.

Where it came from

The Karting World Championship launched in 1964 around 100cc direct-drive machinery, and the formula stuck. Susanna Raganelli won it in 1966 — still the only female world champion. Belgium's François Goldstein took five titles between 1969 and 1975, before the CIK briefly experimented with 135cc Formula K engines from 1981 to 1987. That period belonged to Mike Wilson: six world titles between 1981 and 1989, a record that still stands. The 100cc formula returned and matured into Formula A and Formula Super A, the screaming direct-drive categories where Danilo Rossi collected five world crowns and Davide Forè built his legend. By the mid-2000s the recipe was forty years old and still the purest test in motorsport: air-cooled engines revving to the sky, push starts at full sprint, and no mechanical safety net whatsoever.

How it evolved

In 2007 the CIK-FIA retired the 100cc engines and introduced KF1: 125cc water-cooled units with electric starters, centrifugal clutches and a 16,000rpm limiter, good for around 40hp. It was karting's TaG revolution applied to the very top — and it misfired. Costs climbed, complexity multiplied, and entries fell. Forè won the 2008 KF1 title, Nyck de Vries and Lando Norris (2014) took world championships in the KF years, but the category never won hearts. For the full autopsy, read our history of the KF era.

So in 2016 the CIK-FIA went back to basics with OK — Original Kart. The starter and clutch were binned, the electronics stripped out, and push starts returned. Minimum weight dropped to 150kg, roughly ten kilos lighter than KF, making OK genuinely quicker and rawer than what it replaced. The name was the philosophy: a kart in its original, essential form.

The class today

OK is open to drivers from 14 and sits at the summit of the FIA Karting pyramid, deciding the World and European Championships alongside the gearbox KZ classes. Lorenzo Travisanutto has taken multiple OK world titles, and the class remains the sharpest scouting ground in motorsport — Norris went from KF world champion to Formula One race winner, and today's OK front-runners are tomorrow's single-seater signings. Juniors arrive through OK-Junior, seniors fight for the world title, and the stopwatch settles everything else. Sixty years of name changes, one unbroken bloodline: whoever wins this class is, by definition, the best kart driver alive.

Who is fastest in the class right now? Our live OK world rankings track every counting result, updated race by race.