Born in the Backyard: How Karting Came to Life Just Miles from the McCulloch Factory
By Kart Racers Speed Shop
If you wanted to write a creation myth for American karting, you couldn't invent a better one. In the summer of 1956, in a two-car garage in Echo Park, California — just a handful of miles from the McCulloch Motors factory sitting opposite Los Angeles International Airport — a racing car builder named Art Ingels welded together some steel tubing, bolted on a small two-stroke engine, and accidentally changed motorsport forever.
The engine on that very first kart? A surplus West Bend lawnmower motor. Built by McCulloch.
Let that sink in for a moment. The sport of karting was born on a McCulloch engine, in a Los Angeles garage, within shouting distance of the McCulloch factory. If that's not destiny, it's the next best thing.
The Man Who Thought Small
Art Ingels spent his working days thinking big. As a fabricator at Kurtis Kraft in Glendale — a suburb just northeast of Los Angeles, and the company responsible for building five winning Indianapolis 500 cars — Ingels lived and breathed serious racing machinery. Indy cars. Bonneville record cars. Midget racers. Big, serious, professional iron.
But in his off hours, Ingels thought small. Specifically, he thought about what it would feel like to go fast in the smallest, lightest, most elemental vehicle imaginable. Something anyone could drive. Something that put you so close to the ground that even modest speeds felt like flying.
Working alone in his Echo Park garage with the tools of his trade, Ingels welded up a chassis from chrome-moly steel tubing — the same material he worked with every day at Kurtis Kraft, just in drastically smaller quantities. Low to the ground. Wide track for stability. A three-spoke steering wheel. A simple seat. Four wheels.
Then his friend and neighbor Lou Borelli — an oil company man with a practical understanding of engines — showed up and mounted the motor.
The engine they used was a surplus West Bend 750, an 84cc two-cycle lawnmower powerhead producing about 2.5 horsepower. It had come off the market because of a manufacturing defect that forced McCulloch — which produced the West Bend engine under its manufacturing umbrella — to recall unsold inventory. The engine was a castoff. A surplus oddity. It was also, as history would record, the powerplant of the most important vehicle in karting history.
Borelli connected the engine to the left rear wheel through a countershaft built from bicycle chains, sprockets, and a centrifugal clutch. Braking was achieved by pulling a lever on the right side that pressed a pad against a disc welded to the rear rim. The whole machine sat three inches off the pavement.
Kart Number One was alive.
First Drives: Hills, Humility, and High Hopes
The first test drives were not, by any account, an unqualified success.
Ingels climbed aboard his creation and discovered an uncomfortable truth: the little engine couldn't push him up a hill. At 165 pounds, he was simply too much for 2.5 horsepower to handle on any kind of incline. Borelli, being of slighter build, fared better — he made it up the slope and declared the experiment promising.
They modified. They tinkered. They went back to the garage and addressed the power deficit. Then they tried again. And again. In the vast sprawl of Los Angeles County they found flat stretches of pavement to test their creation, gradually dialing it in until the machine worked the way Ingels had imagined.
By the fall of 1956, they were ready to show it to the world.
Pomona: The Debut That Started Everything
On September 14, 1956, Art Ingels loaded his little creation into a vehicle and drove it to Pomona Raceway, where a sports car race was being held. He wasn't racing it. He was just showing it off — running it around the pits, letting people see what it could do.
The reaction was immediate and electric.
Among the spectators whose jaw dropped that day was Duffy Livingstone, a Los Angeles muffler shop owner who watched Ingels buzz around the Pomona pits and felt something shift in his chest. He walked over to Ingels, asked a few questions, and left with permission to build one of his own.
Livingstone went home. He built a kart. Then he called Ingels and said words that would echo through motorsport history: "Hey, why don't we meet down at the Rose Bowl, and we'll have some fun?"
The Rose Bowl: A Cathedral Is Born
The Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena — just a few miles from where Ingels had built his first kart — became the cradle of organized karting. There were no formal race structures. No officials. No timing equipment. Just a growing band of lunatics in a parking lot, each having built their own version of Ingels' creation, all of them discovering simultaneously that three inches off the ground was the greatest place on earth.
Word spread the way only genuinely exciting things spread — organically, unstoppably, from one person to the next. Livingstone's business partner Roy Desbrow built one. Then others. Then more others. Soon the Rose Bowl parking lot was crowded with homemade karts on weekend mornings, buzzing and snarling like a swarm of angry mechanical wasps, drawing crowds of spectators who couldn't believe what they were seeing.
The Los Angeles police, predictably, took a dim view of the proceedings. Racing in parking lots was not, technically, a sanctioned activity. The karters were repeatedly chased off. But the Pasadena police, it turned out, were considerably more relaxed about a bunch of people having innocent fun in the Rose Bowl lot, and the scene migrated there and thrived.
By 1957, Spencer Murray and Lynn Wineland — editor and graphic designer of Rod & Custom magazine — had caught the fever. They ran a seven-page story in the November 1957 issue under the headline "Putting Wheels under the Peasant." Murray, who owned a kart built by Ingels himself, declared in an accompanying editorial that the go-kart would "surely change the course of anyone's life who is fortunate enough to cross paths with one."
At the time, only 30 go-karts had been built in the entire world. The article detonated like a grenade. Within months, the number was in the thousands.
McCulloch Steps Out of the Wings
Here's where the story comes full circle in the most satisfying way possible.
As karting exploded across America through 1958 and into 1959, clever racers discovered that stripped-down McCulloch chainsaw powerheads — pulled apart, lightened, and freed from their chainsaw housings — were devastatingly fast. Word spread through kart tracks the way useful information always spreads in motorsport: quickly and with great enthusiasm.
The noise eventually reached the McCulloch factory, just a few miles away from where Art Ingels had built Kart Number One three years earlier. The company that had inadvertently supplied the engine for the very first go-kart now found itself being dragged by popular demand into becoming karting's dominant engine supplier.
In 1959, McCulloch made it official with the MC-10 — the first purpose-built dedicated kart engine ever offered by a major manufacturer. It was built in the same Los Angeles factory that had supplied the surplus lawnmower engine that started it all.
The circle was complete.
A City, a Factory, a Garage — and a Sport
Stand on a map of Los Angeles in 1956 and look at what you see within a few square miles of each other:
The McCulloch Motors factory, opposite LAX, humming with two-stroke engines and chainsaw production and the restless ambitions of Robert Paxton McCulloch.
The Kurtis Kraft shop in Glendale, building Indy cars and midget racers, home to a fabricator named Art Ingels with an idea gnawing at him.
A two-car garage in Echo Park, where that idea became steel and rubber and a snarling little engine.
The Pomona Raceway pits, where a muffler shop owner named Duffy Livingstone saw something that changed his life.
The Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena, where a sport was born on weekend mornings, chased by police and fueled by pure joy.
None of these people knew each other's full significance at the time. Ingels was just tinkering. McCulloch was just selling chainsaws. Livingstone was just a guy who liked fast things. But in the Los Angeles sunshine of 1956, they orbited each other and collided in ways that created something the whole world would eventually embrace.
Today karting is a global sport — the first step in the careers of Formula One champions from Ayrton Senna to Lewis Hamilton. It is played on every continent, governed by the FIA, and taken with complete professional seriousness by millions of competitors worldwide.
It started with a faulty lawnmower engine, a garage in Echo Park, and a McCulloch factory just down the road.
Not bad for an accident.
At Kart Racers Speed Shop, we celebrate the history and heritage of karting every day. March is Mac Month — use discount code MAC20 for 20% off all McCulloch items in our store.