The Sixties Boom: Karting Goes Global

No motorsport has ever globalised faster. Karting was invented in 1956; by 1962 it had an FIA commission, and by 1964 a world championship. Eight years from garage experiment to world title — Formula 1 itself took half a century to manage the same arc.

Europe catches the bug

American servicemen, magazine coverage and export crates carried karting across the Atlantic in the late 1950s, and Europe did not just adopt the sport — it reorganised it. The car park anarchy of California was replaced by clubs, national federations and, crucially, factories. By the early 1960s dedicated chassis and engine manufacturers had emerged on both continents, and the centre of gravity was already sliding towards Italy, where firms like Birel and engine builders such as IAME — founded by Bruno Grana, whose Parilla engines would dominate for decades — turned karting into a proper industry.

1962: the CIK

Governance followed. In 1962 the FIA created the Commission Internationale de Karting as a sister commission — the body known today as CIK-FIA, and still the sport's rule-maker, homologator and world championship sanctioning authority. Karting became one of the FIA's world championship disciplines almost immediately, a status only Formula 1 predates.

1964: Rome crowns the first world champion

The first Karting World Championship was staged in 1964 at the Pista d'Oro in Rome, and Italy supplied the winner: Guido Sala, a former Grand Prix motorcycle racer who took the title and then repeated in 1965. The choice of venue told its own story — the sport born in Los Angeles would be governed from Paris and raced, above all, in Italy.

The early championship years produced firsts that still stand. In 1966 Susanna Raganelli won the world title — six decades later she remains the only woman ever to win an FIA world championship in any discipline. By decade's end a Belgian named François Goldstein had begun a run of dominance — four straight titles from 1969 to 1972, plus a fifth in 1975 — that made him karting's first serial superstar.

What the sixties settled

• The rulebook lives in Europe. CIK homologation and European championships became the sport's spine, as they remain today.
• Italy is the industry. The chassis and engine builders who set up shop in the 1960s created a manufacturing cluster that still supplies most of the world's top-level grids.
• 100cc becomes the language. The small direct-drive two-stroke settled in as international karting's standard currency — setting the stage for the 100cc golden age that followed.

By 1970 the experiment was over and the sport was permanent: a world championship, a governing body, a supply industry and national scenes on multiple continents. Everything since has been refinement.