1956: Art Ingels and the Birth of Karting

The sport that now decides who gets a Formula 1 seat began as a garage experiment. In August 1956, Art Ingels — a fabricator at Kurtis Kraft, the Los Angeles shop that built Indianapolis roadsters — welded a simple tubular frame around a surplus West Bend two-stroke and created the first kart. He assembled it from scrap metal in his two-car garage in Echo Park, with Lou Borelli alongside him; the machine, remembered as the Caretta–West Bend, is recognised on the record books as the first kart ever built.

It was crude by design. No gearbox, no suspension, no bodywork — just a seat inches off the tarmac and an engine meant for utility work. But the man who built race cars for a living had, almost by accident, distilled racing down to its essentials.

The Rose Bowl car park

Ingels tested his creation in the car park of the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, and the effect was immediate. What started as one man lapping an empty lot drew hundreds of enthusiasts, and impromptu car park meetings became Southern California's newest obsession. Anyone with basic tools could copy the formula: cheap surplus engines — adapted from lawnmowers, chainsaws and small industrial units — bolted to home-welded frames.

From hobby to industry

The boom arrived fast. Within two years, dedicated builders were selling complete machines, and one of them — Go Kart Manufacturing Co. — put a name on the sport that never came off. Engine makers followed the customers: chainsaw and outboard manufacturers began supplying the kart market directly, and the days of raiding the garden shed for power were numbered. Purpose-built tracks started to appear as the car park scene outgrew itself, and organised racing emerged before the decade was out.

Proof of how fast it scaled: in December 1959 — barely three years after that first garage build — the Go Kart Club of America ran an international championship event in Nassau, Bahamas, won by American Jim Yamane. A machine invented in 1956 already had international silverware by 1959.

Why it stuck

Plenty of 1950s crazes died. Karting survived because Ingels' formula was genuinely right: the lightest possible chassis, the driver as the biggest single variable, and costs an ordinary family could reach. The sport spread through the United States and jumped to Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where governing bodies, factories and a world championship structure were waiting to be built — that story continues in the sixties boom.

Seventy years on, the essentials have not moved. An eight-year-old in today's Mini 60 rankings sits in a machine Art Ingels would recognise at a glance: steel tubes, one small two-stroke, and nowhere for the driver to hide. Every world champion since has started, in effect, in his garage.