It's not often that you can say a sport owes its existence to a particular person. But, when it comes to go-karting, you know who first welded together a simple tubular frame, added four wheelbarrow wheels and powered the whole contraption with a Clinton lawnmower engine. As is often the case with fun things, it all started in sunny California.

Art Ingels is the name of the inventor who built the first map in the mid-fifties, just over forty years ago. Yes, we have him to thank not only for the concept, but also for the name. Cart is the English word for a simple cart, but Art chose the spelling go-kart, a name that is still the most commonly used term wherever go-karts are used. Art himself was amazed at how much fun it was to drive a go-kart and what a great feeling of speed he experienced as he drove around the parking lot of the local supermarket. Soon friends and acquaintances were lining up to try it out, and it was off to the races. Someone started building a small series of chassis, someone organized the first competition, someone found that chainsaw engines were even sharper than lawnmower engines, and the whole circus was on. In Sweden, we could read about what was going on at the Crescent Raceway in Los Angeles and elsewhere through special go-kart magazines, such as Karting World.

But in Sweden, of course, we would have our own version of the new sport, and in the early sixties, go-kart cars with motorcycle engines were more common than those with un-geared chainsaw engines. We raced on makeshift tracks, and because the geared cars had large ten-inch wheels, it was possible to race on gravel tracks. The magazine Teknik för Alla got involved in the new fly, and in TfA there was a building description of a very successful construction. It wasn't always easy to borrow or rent a track to race on. In Gothenburg, one of the first races was held on a rainy Saturday at Wartas plan, one of Gothenburg's many football pitches. As the rain poured down, as it often does in Gothenburg, the karts dug deeper and deeper into the pitch. In the end, there was only one deep track where the maps flew out. The next day, football was to be played on the same pitch. When the caretaker of Warta's pitch saw what the go-karts had done, this led to a total ban on the rental of municipal pitches for go-karting in Gothenburg.

But, the development went towards the unchanged classes, and then the gravel pitches were no longer suitable. We had to borrow parking spaces and make tracks with endless amounts of rubber tires that were used as track markings. Safety was sometimes so-so, people stood right up to the tires and watched. Then you drove with the geared classes with 250 cm3 engines of the most diverse kind, Sachs, Durkopf, DKW, yes it was probably mostly German engines in that class.

Ronnie Petersson first drove a magnificent geared kart, built by his father the sugar baker from Örebro. But the un-geared karts became more and more popular, but you drove with two 100 cm3 engines that drove on the same rigid rear axle. The most popular engine was the McCulloch, which came in many different versions. Anyone who brought a Dart kart with twin Mc10 engines received many admiring glances. But there was also a Swedish engine that successfully ravaged fields and parking lots. The chainsaw manufacturer Partner in Mölndal had a kart engine, the Partner RS90. They had their own factory driver, Sven Faijersson, who managed to extract an unimaginable amount of horsepower from the small engines. They drove with a clutch and starter. Many engines were difficult to start and drivers and mechanics tugged at the starter cord before starting. Sven Faijersson was always cool as a cucumber and waited until everyone else had worked themselves half to death. Then he took a starting rope in each hand and lifted up the back end of the kart. Then he put his foot on the back arch and stepped on it - and - the engines started and idled benevolently!

The first permanent track in Sweden was built in Laxå, and the driving force behind the construction was Bertil Lundberg, who has been a pioneer and initiator of all go-karting in Sweden, and who has also contributed to the international success of the sport. "What a thrill it was to come to Laxå and drive on a track built especially for go-karting, and it's fair to say that people came from all over the country. By today's standards, it was a fairly small track of barely five hundred meters, but through the Laxå track, go-karting took the step from a fun game in a parking lot to a real motorsport. The Swedish Automobile Federation took go-karting under its wing, and through the karting committee led by Nisse Björkman, the sport was given an opportunity to develop in Sweden, a development that many other countries followed.

When the first Italian engine arrived in Sweden, the Komet K10, we realized that a new area of the sport had begun. There were no mufflers in those days, and two (!) Komet engines on a kart not only ran the laps so much faster than the chainsaw engines, they were also so much louder. Or as one driver put it: "You drove the kart on Saturday and Sunday, and on Sunday evening you were stone deaf. Then you worked Monday to Thursday. On Friday you started to hear a bit again, and then it was time to drive on Saturday again!" No wonder many people became deaf.

Bertil Lundberg was for many years a Swedish delegate in the International Karting Committee, CIK as they say. Thanks to this, Sweden was able to participate in organizing major international competitions early on. In the early seventies, both the European Championships and the World Championships were held in Sweden, at the tracks in Kristianstad, Kalmar and Jönköping, which already then held a very high international class. We Swedes were known for organizing competitions with order and tidiness, but the drivers complained about our prize tables. When the Swedes eventually came to compete in Italy and France, the reasons for the complaints were understood. One European Championship event in Italy had a couple of three motorcycles as prizes, and all the participants got something to take home. This was different from when the first prize winner in Kristianstad received the Swedish Automobile Federation's coat pin!

If we try to summarize the development of go-karting in the forty years since Art Ingel drove the first go-kart in California, it is clear that the sport today has a huge breadth. There are many, many people who still think it's fun to just drive around once in a while, and for them there have been many rental kart tracks. Recently, these have moved indoors so that you can now go karting all year round in Sweden too. But karting is also an extremely elite sport with skilled drivers and large and expensive teams. The chairman of the International Karting Committee, Swiss Ernst C. Buser, usually emphasizes that there is hardly any really successful formula driver who has not started his racing career in a go-kart. All the big names have a past as go-kart drivers, and they are still happy to go-kart today if the opportunity arises. If you meet world champion Lewis Hamilton and you don't know what to talk to him about, you can ask him to talk about his go-karting days. He will be happy to do so, and for a long time.

In Sweden, go-karting has largely followed international developments, and to some extent we have followed the international rules. But in one respect, Sweden has also been a pioneer in go-karting. In Sweden, we have seen the potential of go-karting to bring whole families together around the sport. At an early stage, the Swedish Automobile Sport Federation opened up some simpler classes for younger drivers, which led to a very positive development of go-karting. This development owes much of its success to one man and one company. Leif Radne is the name of the man who started out driving karts himself, but soon realized that the sport of karting could benefit him more if he devoted himself to manufacturing and selling engines, chassis and all the other accessories needed.

In 1971, he built his own engine using the piston and cylinder from a Partner 100 cm3 chainsaw engine. This laid the foundation for the engine that is now available in the Mini and Micro classes under the name Raket 95. It is the same engine that today has been sold in 40,000 copies almost all over the world and has been involved in starting youth classes in many places. It was in the Mini class that Marcus Eriksson and 4 of his Formula 1 colleagues started driving karts with Raket!