Art Ingels (sometimes misspelled as Ingles; May 14, 1918 - December 16, 1981) is known as 'the father of
karting
Kart racing or karting is a road racing variant of motorsport with open-wheel, four-wheeled vehicles known as go-karts or shifter karts. They are usually raced on scaled-down circuits, although some professional kart races are also held on f ...
'.
In 1956, while he was a race car builder at
Kurtis Kraft
Kurtis Kraft was an American designer and builder of race cars. The company built midget cars, quartermidgets, sports cars, sprint cars, Bonneville cars, and USAC Championship cars. It was founded by Frank Kurtis when he built his own midge ...
, a famous builder of
Indy
Indy may refer to:
Computing and technology
*Indy (software), used for Internet access to music
*Internet Direct, or "Indy", a software library
*SGI Indy, a computer workstation
Periodicals
*''The Indy'', shorthand for newspapers that include " ...
race car
Auto racing (also known as car racing, motor racing, or automobile racing) is a motorsport involving the racing of automobiles for competition.
Auto racing has existed since the invention of the automobile. Races of various sorts were organi ...
s during the 1950s, he assembled the first
Go-Kart
A go-kart, also written as go-cart (often referred to as simply a kart), is a type of sports car, close wheeled car, open-wheel car or quadracycle. Go-karts come in all shapes and forms, from non-motorised models to high-performance Kart rac ...
in history out of scrap metal and a surplus
West Bend Company The West Bend Company was a West Bend, Wisconsin, company from 1911 to 2001. The West Bend Company manufactured aluminum cookware and electrical appliances, but also made two-stroke cycle engines, including outboard boat motors. Art Ingels use ...
two-stroke
A two-stroke (or two-stroke cycle) engine is a type of internal combustion engine that completes a Thermodynamic power cycle, power cycle with two strokes (up and down movements) of the piston during one power cycle, this power cycle being comple ...
engine
An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy.
Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power gen ...
. It was built in his two-car garage in
Echo Park, California
In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound. The delay is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the lis ...
, (now FIX Coffee Co), and was tested in the
Rose Bowl parking lot, where it gained hundreds of enthusiasts.
See also
*
List of people known as "father" or "mother" of something
References
External links
The first kart at Vintage Karts
American racing drivers
People from Echo Park, Los Angeles
Place of birth missing
1918 births
1981 deaths
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