What if Norris, Piastri, and Verstappen battled for the F1 World Championship on karts?

Think of any regular OK driver, maybe even a winner, one of those paying Academy contract youngsters with neatly styled hair waiting for their fifteenth birthday to race in F4—with a lineup of car tests already done and an Instagram full of statements and slow-motion videos like a seasoned adult Legend. Now imagine putting him in a KZ kart, signing him up for the European and World championships, and seeing him smash (on the stopwatch) Senna Van Walstijn, Palomba, Travisanutto, and company, winning European and World titles in his first KZ year. Not KZ2, KZ.

You can’t, right? Exactly, because it’s impossible. A story like this last played out in history, and no, it will never happen again, in 2013. That year, Max Verstappen not only dominated KF (today’s OK) by winning the European Championship, but also thoroughly crushed the KZ European and World championships, dominating the season at a time when putting minors in F1 was not a priority. One or two seasons in KZ were part of a driver’s development path, and the proof that nothing like this will ever happen again lies in the KZ World Championship winner’s list from 2014 onwards: none of the post-Verstappen KZ World Champions have ever even seen a Formula 1, Formula 2, or Formula 3 car, if you’re into nerdy stats.

 

Let’s look at the contenders (and favorites) for the F1 World Championship: Norris and Piastri. They come from a different karting background, although they’re not that much younger than Max (Max was born in 1997, Norris in 1999, and Piastri in 2001). Lando won a Karting World Championship exactly in 2014, the year karting drew a line in the sand and, after 2016 with the introduction of OK, gradually turned into what it is today—a huge Mini-Junior category filled with pre-15-year-olds, at least in the classes for those who want to become professional drivers. It was a surprise World title in France, ahead of a certain Mazepin, during a season where Lando wasn’t among the leading figures. At the time, his father maintained two top-level karting drivers, Lando and his older brother Oliver (who now sells simulators). Lando, who never raced in KZ, moved to cars at 15, inaugurating the modern pipeline with drivers jumping straight from single-gear karts to single-seaters. It’s pretty clear, then, that in a hypothetical head-to-head today—on a KZ kart, the only type F1 drivers sometimes use to train—the Englishman would be crushed by someone who in his first KZ year beat Ardigò and others in their specialty.

 

Lastly, Piastri, who competed only one year in FIA karting, finishing sixth at the 2016 World Championship in Bahrain. Quite successful at his levels, Oscar then had a nearly perfect progression in junior formulas, winning everywhere and always in his first year. But in karting—although many, including Ricky Flynn (Norris’s kart Team Manager), remember him as a very good driver—he spent, as many of his generation did, too little time. He also never raced in KZ, since after OKJ he went directly to cars in 2017. For this reason, it’s probably very hard to imagine him winning in a showdown with the Dutch cannibal on a kart.

A three-way battle on a kart track that, unfortunately, we will never see.