The Race-Car Builder Who Invented the Go-Kart in His Garage

In the summer of 1956, a race-car builder named Art Ingels welded some leftover steel tubing into a tiny, low-slung chassis. He had no idea he was about to invent an entire sport.

A Side Project From an Indy Car Shop

By day, Ingels built race cars at Kurtis Kraft, the Southern California shop behind several Indy 500-winning cars of the era. He was used to building things that were fast and dangerous.

What he built at night, in the two-car garage of his Echo Park home in Los Angeles, was neither. It sat inches off the ground and was made almost entirely from spare parts.

A Borrowed Engine

Ingels and a friend, Lou Borelli, bolted a surplus West Bend two-stroke engine onto the little frame. It was the kind of small engine used on all sorts of postwar machinery, repurposed for something nobody had built before.

There was no blueprint. Ingels had spent years shaping metal for a living, and this was him doing it for himself.

The Rose Bowl Parking Lot

He'd first taken the kart out at a race meet in Pomona. Soon after, he brought it to the vast, empty parking lot at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Word got around fast.

Other guys from the racing scene showed up within days, some of them building copies of their own out of whatever scrap they could find. A new kind of racing, cheap enough for almost anyone to try, was born in that parking lot.

Art Ingels is credited with building the first go-kart in history.

From One Garage to a Global Sport

Karting spread fast across Southern California and then the country. It grew into an internationally sanctioned motorsport, with its own world championship run under the Commission Internationale de Karting.

Millions of people have now taken a turn behind the wheel of a kart, often as their first taste of real speed.

One of karting's biggest annual US races, the SKUSA SuperNationals, still runs its track across a parking lot each November, laid out at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It is a different lot, in a different state, nearly seventy years after Ingels first drove out onto one.