Jorrit Pex

One lap to go at Le Mans, September 2015. Paolo De Conto has led the KZ world final for most of the race, with Jorrit Pex glued to his rear bumper and Marco Ardigò closing on both. Pex lunges for the inside, the two karts almost stop in the corner — and the Dutchman emerges ahead, holding on to become world champion by metres. It remains one of the defining last laps in modern karting, and the crowning moment of the sport's most famous family business.

The karting years

Born in 1993 in Roermond, Pex was raised in a paddock. The family operation — known over the years as Pex Racing and later SP Motorsport, with brother Stan alongside — turned the Dutch and German gearbox scenes into a private hunting ground, and Jorrit collected four German championships and the 2012 European title in the top shifter class with CRG while still barely into his twenties.

For 2015 the family squad re-joined the CRG fold with a single objective: the KZ World Championship. At Le Mans, running a CRG-TM with engines prepared by Jos Verstappen and Franco Drudi, Pex delivered with that last-lap strike on De Conto, while Ardigò lost third to a nose-cone penalty behind them. The European titles kept coming: champion again in 2018 with CRG, then again in 2019 at Sarno — where he became the first driver ever to make Kart Republic a champion chassis in KZ, taking his tally in the top gearbox class to three. Through it all he stayed loyal to the family structure, racing for SP Motorsport, the team built around the Pex brothers.

What made him different

Patience with a killer instinct. Le Mans 2015 was not a lucky lunge; it was forty minutes of pressure applied until the gap appeared, which is the Pex method in miniature. He is also the rare world champion whose engine builder was a former world champion's father-figure rival — the Verstappen connection running deep through Dutch karting, with Jos preparing the power behind the title. And there is the dynasty factor: Jorrit and Stan operating as team-mates, rivals and business partners at once, with father Richard's organisation behind them. No other family has stayed at the front of the gearbox class for so long on its own terms.

Legacy

Pex made the family team model work at world-championship level in an era dominated by Italian factory squads — a Dutch outfit beating CRG's, Tony Kart's and Sodi's own works entries with their machinery and better preparation. He gave Kart Republic its first KZ championship silverware, shaping today's chassis market, and the SP Motorsport structure has become a finishing school for the Dutch shifter scene that keeps feeding the KZ2 rankings. Above all, he is still out there: deep into the 2020s, Jorrit and Stan were both still lining up at the European Championship, world champion and brother trading paint with drivers ten years younger. Alongside countryman Bas Lammers and rivals Paolo De Conto and Marco Ardigò, he defines the KZ generation that made shifter karting a career worth having.