A 14-year-old middle school driver has made history at South Korea's top kart racing competition, becoming the youngest season champion in the senior class.
Lee Min-jae, a second-year student at Hopyeong Middle School in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, and a member of Pino Kart, clinched the overall title in the senior class of the 2026 KARA Kart Championship, organized by the Korea Automobile Racing Association.
Under the competition's rules, drivers aged 14 are typically expected to compete in the junior class. Lee, however, chose to enter the senior class — the highest rating in domestic karting — where he faced adult and veteran drivers.
Maintaining a steady pace throughout the season, Lee accumulated points with consistent top finishes and ended the campaign with 117 points after a tight battle that went down to the final round. He edged the second-place driver by just one point.
That one-point margin secured Lee the senior class title and made him the first 14-year-old driver in the championship's history to win the senior division overall.
The victory has drawn wide praise given that it came against a backdrop of rapidly shifting conditions in domestic karting and a relative hardware disadvantage. The 2026 season saw a surge of imported engines incorporating the latest foreign technology, making equipment competition fiercer than ever.
While many rivals moved to high-performance foreign engines to gain a power advantage, Lee and Pino Kart took a different approach. Rather than swapping equipment mid-season, the team chose to trust the technical expertise and tuning capabilities they had built together over years, committing to finishing the season with their existing team engine.
That meant accepting a potential power deficit against some competitors. But the mechanics and engineers pushed the chassis setup and engine balance to their limits, and Lee answered in kind with fluid cornering and disciplined race management. Ultimately, it was a "one team" victory — forged by the driver's unwavering belief and the Pino Kart crew's dedication in extracting near-perfect performance from the machine.
With the domestic title secured, Lee's sights are now set on the world stage. After competing in the final round of the Arena Kart Championship in Jeungpyeong, North Chungcheong Province, in November, he will travel directly to Malaysia.
There, he will represent South Korea at the FIA Karting World Championship at the LYL Circuit, competing against top young talents from around the globe. All eyes will be on whether Lee — who claimed the national title with skill beyond his years and polished teamwork — can make his mark at the world's most prestigious karting event under the South Korean flag.
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