Max Verstappen

No karter has ever had a season like Max Verstappen's 2013. Fifteen years old, and in a single campaign he took two CIK-FIA European championships and the KZ World Championship at Varennes-sur-Allier — beating Charles Leclerc to the gearbox crown and becoming the youngest world champion the shifter class had ever seen. Then he left for cars, and karting has argued about the benchmark ever since.

The karting years

Verstappen was in a kart at four and racing championships by seven, with father Jos — ex-F1 himself — running the programme: engines, chassis, and endless van miles across Europe. Belgium got him first. He took VAS championship and Mini Junior honours in 2005 and 2006, the Rotax Max Challenge Belgium and the Dutch championship in 2007, the Belgian cadet crown in 2008 alongside Mini Max wins in the Rotax and Benelux series, then defended the Mini Max titles and added the Belgian KF5 championship in 2009.

In 2010 CRG signed him to its factory squad for the international stage. He finished runner-up to Alexander Albon at the KF3 World Cup, reversed the result over Albon in the WSK Euro Series, and collected WSK World Series and Nations Cup wins on the way through the direct-drive ranks that now feed OKJ. Then came the leap that defined him: into KZ, the senior gearbox class, while still 15. The 2013 season delivered the European KF and KZ titles and the World KZ Championship at Varennes, with Leclerc beaten in the final. Within months he was testing single-seaters; by 2014 he was gone.

What made him different

The KZ jump, above all. Shifter karting is a grown man's discipline — six gears, front brakes, and grids full of career specialists — and the class's hundred-year-old bloodline had never crowned a teenager like this. Verstappen did not sneak the 2013 title; he beat the establishment head-on, at pace, in a final against his generation's other superstar. The duels with Leclerc ran right through their junior years and carried straight into Formula 1.

Then there was the Jos factor: factory CRG equipment tuned by an obsessive former grand prix driver, and a teenager hardened by a schedule most professionals would refuse. Rivals recall the Verstappens arriving having already tested more than anyone else would all week.

Legacy

Verstappen made KZ box office again. The 2013 world final turned the gearbox class into the place serious talent proves itself, and every ambitious teenager weighing a KZ move since has been sold the Varennes story. His exit set a template too: win everything, leave at the top, waste nothing. In cars it worked to the month — Formula 3 in 2014, an F1 debut at 17 in 2015, and four consecutive world championships from 2021 to 2024. Karting's claim on him is total: he was, briefly, the best in the world at this first.