Davide Forè

Most world champions get an era. Davide Forè got two. He won world championships in 1998 and 2000, lost the crown to the next generation, and then won it back in 2004 and 2006 — four world titles spread across nine seasons, every one of them on a Tony Kart with Vortex power. And then, instead of retiring, he simply kept racing. He still is.

The karting years

Born in 1974 in Mazzano, near Brescia, Forè served notice with second place in the 1995 Formula Super A World Championship, and broke through properly in 1998, taking the FSA world title at Ugento. He repeated in 2000 at Braga, with a young Heikki Kovalainen back in third. When the results dipped in 2001 and 2002 — third in the world both years — plenty assumed the cycle had turned. Forè answered with the 2004 Formula A World Championship at La Conca, beating Arnaud Kozlinski with Bas Lammers third, and a fourth crown at Angerville in 2006, aged 32, in the last years before the 100cc formula gave way to the modern OK lineage. Between the titles sat a decade of podiums, World Cup wins and headline victories on every continent karting visits.

The second career started where most stop. From 2009 Forè spent seven seasons with CRG concentrating on gearbox karts, finishing runner-up in the 2012 KZ1 European Championship and taking marquee wins like the 2015 Race of Stars in Australia — top-level KZ results well into his forties.

What made them different

Longevity built on appetite. Forè's four world titles came against three distinct generations of rival — the Rossi-Manetti wave of the late 1990s, the Liuzzi and van der Garde group of the early 2000s, then the Kozlinski-Ardigò era — and he beat all of them with the same combination of ruthless race pace and total professionalism. Team bosses valued him as much for development work as for Sundays; drivers half his age valued him rather less, because he kept beating them. Where his great contemporary Danilo Rossi compressed his dominance into the 1990s, Forè stretched his across two decades, and the pair defined what it meant to be a professional factory kart driver.

Legacy

Forè became the living proof that karting is a career in its own right. After the CRG years he managed the Birel ART racing team, coached rising drivers including Suleiman Zanfari and Connor Zilisch, worked with the TM engine factory — and refused to hang up his helmet, declaring past his 45th birthday that racing was too big a part of his life to stop. He meant it: into 2026, past his 51st birthday, Forè was still entering Italian championship and WSK KZ2 fields against drivers born after his fourth world title. Check any modern race calendar and there is a fair chance his name is somewhere on an entry list. Four world championships made him a legend; the thirty-year refusal to leave made him karting's favourite one.