No Stopping Her Now: How Kaylee Countryman is Supercharging Racing's Next Generation
There's a yellow line that runs down the middle of a taxiway at a small air park in Chandler, Arizona. It's an unremarkable detail, the kind of thing you'd drive past without a second thought. But for Kaylee Countryman, that line was the beginning of everything.
"I would drive a 20 mph golf cart around the taxiway, and try and see if I could keep it on the right side of this yellow line, while taking corners and trying to see how fast I could go through some of them," she told us, laughing at the memory. "That's just kind of how it started."
Four and a half years later, that same instinct, the one that made a kid chase apexes in a golf cart, had her lined up on the grid in Shanghai, racing for the Haas F1 Team-backed entry in F1 Academy. At 16 years old, she's the youngest driver on the grid. She's also, this season, racing a dual campaign that would exhaust drivers twice her age: a full F1 Academy calendar with ART Grand Prix, plus selected rounds of USF2000, stateside.
We caught up with Kaylee in the paddock at the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham Street Circuit, where she was competing in the USF2000 event supporting the IndyCar weekend, to talk about how she got here, what it's actually like to build a racing career at 16, and what she wants other girls chasing this same dream to know.
Kaylee with her stepsiblings Kaylee on a track walk Kaylee in a personal photo
From a Golf Cart to a Race Suit
Kaylee's actual racing career didn't start with go-karts on her twelfth birthday, but the timeline from there is almost absurdly fast. She began karting in a four-stroke Briggs & Stratton-powered kart, in the LO206 J2 class, and it took her all of one lap to get hooked. Multiple podiums followed, including a P2 finish at a national event in California and an appearance at the Grand Nationals in Indiana.
In 2023, she moved into two-stroke, international-level karting, and claimed her first international podium with a third-place finish in Canada. A year later, in 2024, came the leap that changed everything for a young driver: her first open-wheel race, in a RUSH SR car, where she earned a podium on debut.
"I got into karting and I did two years of that, and then did some testing in cars after that," she explained, matter-of-fact about a progression that, from the outside, looks anything but ordinary. "And then USF Juniors last year, and USF2000 and F1 Academy this year."
In 2025, racing full-time in USF Juniors with Exclusive Autosport, Countryman worked through a difficult start to the season before turning it around, taking her first top-ten at Mid-Ohio in June, then bettering it with an eighth-place finish at the same venue a month later. She added two more top-tens at Road America and Portland, finishing 16th in the championship. She also made select USF2000 appearances that year, picking up an 11th-place finish in Toronto, a result that, in hindsight, was a preview of the city she'd return to a year later.
The Call from Haas
On her 16th birthday, Countryman was announced as the 10th driver confirmed for the 2026 F1 Academy grid, racing for ART Grand Prix with backing from the Haas F1 Team. It made her the youngest full-time driver in the series.
"I’m so thrilled that I’ve been given this opportunity to represent Haas F1 Team and ART Grand Prix in the F1 Academy for 2026," she said at the time. Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu was equally direct about why they backed her: "Her personality and passion for this sport are contagious, and we want to ensure she has everything she needs to flourish in F1 Academy."
The 2026 season didn't start easily. Countryman had a difficult opening round in Shanghai. But by Montreal, the turnaround was already visible: she scored her maiden F1 Academy points with a seventh-place finish in race one, then delivered her first-ever single-seater podium, finishing second in the reverse-grid race.
Talking to us about what it means to race in F1 Academy at all, Countryman was clear-eyed about the platform she's part of. "F1 Academy is a great experience for young girls to be getting involved in motorsport. It's definitely got a lot of eyes on it right now," she said. "With all of the F1 teams supporting, and major brands like Sephora and Gatorade also supporting some of the drivers, it’s clear there’s a real movement happening."
She's also quick to credit the person who built the platform in the first place. "I think Susie Wolff is of course an amazing driver, but also starting F1 Academy is just such an amazing accomplishment and impact that she's had on women in motorsports," Countryman told us.
Two Ladders, One Season
What makes Countryman's 2026 campaign unusual isn't just her age. It's the sheer scope of it. While her F1 Academy commitments have her racing on Grand Prix support bills across three continents, she's simultaneously running a partial USF2000 campaign with Exclusive Autosport (later switching seats to JHDD powered by ECR from round two onward), chasing top-tens in what used to be called the Road to Indy.
"Being on both ladder systems, to both F1 and the Road to Indy, is just a great experience overall," she said.
It's also, by her own admission, relentless. Her USF2000 season delivered a run of gritty, incremental results, a ninth-place finish at Indianapolis, and a genuinely strong weekend at Portland where she scored back-to-back top-tens through determined recovery drives after difficult starts. Then came Markham.
The inaugural USF2000 race at the new Markham Street Circuit was chaos from the start. Friday's track activity was scrapped entirely, Saturday's qualifying was abandoned due to the compressed schedule, and as a result the Race 1 grid ended up set by championship points. Countryman fought back to P13 in a disrupted Race 1, but her second race ended prematurely after an unavoidable multi-car accident.
It was, in other words, exactly the kind of weekend that tests a driver's composure rather than their outright pace, on a brand-new circuit, in a city she'd never raced in before, with barely any track time to learn it.
Kaylee with her parents Kaylee with her teammates for F1 Academy's Disney collaboration
Learning to Build a Brand, One Race at a Time
One of the more striking parts of our conversation wasn't about lap times at all. It was about what it actually takes, in 2026, to sustain a career like hers.
"I'm no expert on this. I'm still learning as I'm going, of course," Countryman said, when asked what advice she'd give other young drivers navigating the sponsorship hunt. "What I've learned is to focus on building your own brand. Even though it might not be something you really want to pay that much attention to, social media is something that is definitely taking the world by storm nowadays."
She's refreshingly honest about how hard that actually is when your entire life is spent traveling and racing. "Sharing my life online that's not racing has become a bit more difficult, because either I'm always in a car, or I feel like I am only a race car driver," she admitted. Her advice to other young drivers in the same position: find something else besides driving to show people. "Discovering new hobbies, discovering what you like, or if you have animals showing them off. Something that you can post online so fans can learn and know about you, and you can build more of a fan base, and you have something to actually offer sponsors."
She's putting that philosophy into practice herself, with her own merchandise line in its final stages of production as of our conversation. "I have pretty much all the designs ready, and who's going to make the shirts, the company, all the photos are taken. It's really close. It's in the final stretch."
What's Left in 2026
With her USF2000 season wrapped early due to calendar conflicts, Countryman's focus for the rest of the year is squarely on F1 Academy, and on a stretch of races that means something different to her than the rest of the calendar: coming home.
Her season has already taken her to Shanghai, about as far from Arizona as it's possible to get, along with Montreal and Zandvoort. The remaining rounds bring her to two circuits on her home turf that she's never actually raced before: The USGP at Circuit of the Americas and the Las Vegas Grand Prix on the streets of Vegas.
"I'm just looking forward to being home, racing at COTA, racing at Vegas, and just having some home fans there hopefully," she said. Vegas in particular comes with its own logistical curveball: a race run at night, which means resetting her entire body clock. "I’ll actually changed my entire sleep schedule to be up at night at that time," she said. "I think last year the F1 track walk was at like 2:00 in the morning."
She's also looking forward to F1 Academy's expanded Thursday programming at the USGP, even if she wasn't sure of every detail yet when we spoke. "If it’s just more fans being able to see more of the paddock and being able to see more of us behind the scenes, then it should be a really cool experience for more people to learn about F1 Academy," she said.
Kaylee and her team celebrating her 3rd place finish in Montreal Kaylee and her Race Engineer, Gaëtan
"Believe That You Can Do It"
We closed our conversation by asking Kaylee the age-old question, “What does it mean to be a Motorsports Girlie?” Along with asking what advice she has for other women trying to find their way into this sport, whether behind the wheel or somewhere else in the paddock entirely?
Her answer was simple, and she was quick to point out it might sound like a cliché. "Just believe that you can do it," she said. "As a driver, I think we've all experienced some difference in how people treat us based on our gender, but it doesn't have to be. We're still drivers at the end of the day, we still drive the same car out there in the same race at the same time. So it shouldn't matter as much as it for some reason does."
That weekend in Markham, Countryman was the only girl racing in either USF2000 or USF Pro 2000. By her own count, there were no women in Indy NXT, and none in IndyCar itself. It's a fact she states plainly, without self-pity, and with an eye clearly fixed on changing it.
"I hope that if we can inspire more girls to get involved with motorsport, it won't be like this for much longer," she said.
Given everything she's accomplished in the four and a half years since zooming around in that golf cart on the taxiway, we wouldn't bet against her.
Kaylee Countryman races for ART Grand Prix in F1 Academy, backed by the Haas F1 Team, and competes part-time in the USF2000 Championship.
Follow her season as she heads to COTA and the Las Vegas Grand Prix later this year through her Instagram or website.
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