Formula Racing
Chloe Chambers: Dream Chaser
The talented American driver Chloe Chambers inches closer to her goal of racing in F1.
Contortionists, ventriloquists and dog trainers are just a few of the mind-bending performers who have featured prominently on America's Got Talent over the years, but those acts had nothing on Chloe Chambers, a magician behind the wheel.
In 2022, Chambers appeared on the hit TV series to show off her driving skills. Never mind that she had only recently earned her license. A year and a half earlier, with just a learner's permit, Chambers set the Guinness World Record for the fastest vehicle slalom, laying down a 47.45 second time across 50 cones spaced 50 feet apart in a Porsche 718 Spyder.
With NASCAR'S Atlanta Motor Speedway standing in for AGT's usual theater stage, Chambers performed a handful of stunt-driving tricks before replicating her record-setting run for the show's panel of judges. None was more impressed than Simon Cowell, a serious gearhead who gamely tried to match Chambers feat for feat but was left spinning his wheels. And while the young driver ultimately lost out on the $500,000 grand prize, she still made a name for herself that night. Now she's got her sights set much higher, as she seeks to become the first woman in more than three decades to start a Formula 1 race.
"It's always been my goal since I was little. It seems like I'm going on a very upward trajectory," said Chambers.
That was back in spring 2022, when we met at the inaugural running of the Miami Grand Prix. At the time, Chambers was still a teen and moments from making her on- track debut in the W Series, an all- female championship serving as an undercard to F1. What’s more, her racing-team boss was Caitlyn Jenner, an ex-driver who also knows a thing or two about competing on a big stage for the highest stakes. It was a lot of pressure for someone so young, but Chambers can scarcely remember it now. “I was still in my senior year of high school,” Chambers recalls in a recent Zoom interview. “Graduation was still a couple months out. I was probably still preparing for finals, as I was during most weekends that year.”
In October, the now 20-year-old graduated to a new level in her racing career with the announcement that she’ll be joining Red Bull Ford for the 2025 season of F1 Academy, an initiative that hopes to elevate women drivers to the uppermost levels of the sport. That includes Formula 1—the highest level of single-seat, open- wheel racing. Over the course of its 74-year history, F1 has seen a grand total of five women enter a grand prix. Lella Lombardi, a butcher’s daughter who expressed an early passion for racing while thrashing her family’s delivery truck, is the only one of those women to ever score in F1’s point system. In the years since then, a number of women drivers would set their sights on F1—not least Susie Wolff, who, in 2014, became the first woman driver in 22 years to participate in an F1 weekend. Alas, that was just the beginning of the long odds against Chambers—a native of China who was adopted by American parents at 11 months old. Until Logan Sargeant came along in 2023, the last American to race in F1 full-time was Toro Rosso’s Scott Speed.
Chambers has the Guinness World Record for fastest vehicle slalom.
© Mark Urban
The upshot for Chambers is that F1 has begun in earnest to reckon with the gender gap in motorsports. In 2019, a group of former racing drivers and financiers came together to launch the W Series, an all-female competition that functioned both as a developmental league for women and an undercard for F1 racing events. In 2022, Chambers joined the series as a driver for Jenner Racing, a team that was started that same year by Caitlyn Jenner—a serious gearhead in her own right.
If Chambers were tracking her F1 goal on a progress bar back then, it would’ve said she’s “20 percent there,” she says. She was not only racing in the same types of cars that F1 pros cut their teeth in on their way to the top but also competing on the same F1 tracks that they did every weekend. In the case of the Miami Grand Prix, a W Series doubleheader, she raced on that road course before the F1 drivers—and ran well until a series of rookie mistakes cost her in the two races. Making matters worse, rumors of the W’s collapse abounded that weekend, making Chambers’ career prospects that much more daunting.
I remember pulling a second gap on the first lap and thinking, ‘OK, this is gonna be pretty good.’
In October 2022, those rumors were confirmed at an all-hands meeting before a W race in Singapore, led by series CEO Catherine Bond Muir. “She basically told us she wasn’t sure we were gonna make it to the end of the season because of funding issues,” says Chambers, recalling that stressful period of uncertainty. “I knew there was going to be another pathway for me somewhere, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure if I would be able to stay in open wheel."
Despite the W folding after the Singapore race, Chambers found a lifeline in Formula Oceania, an open-wheel series based in New Zealand, where she was one of two women drivers. It was a long way to travel for Chambers, who calls central Indiana home. But it helped that her dad came along (mostly because she still wasn’t 18), and that there were family friends waiting to embrace her on the other side of the world. The learning experience on the track was no less positive; in the penultimate race of the season Chambers started on pole and led every lap on the way to grabbing the checkered flag—the first time a woman had ever done that. The result sealed a ninth-place finish in the overall standings and led to her being named most improved driver.
As Chambers was putting in laps Down Under in 2023, a new all- women racing series called F1 Academy launched with Wolff, the F1 trailblazer, as its director. Soon thereafter, Chambers landed an F1 Academy ride with Campos Racing for the 2024 season and immediately showed how far her racecraft had come along. Back at the Miami International Autodrome for the second weekend of competition, Chambers finished third in the first race of that doubleheader for a maiden podium finish.
Later in the season, in Barcelona, she took her first-ever F1 Academy win, overtaking the pole-sitter in Turn 1 before cruising to a six-second victory—an eternity in motorsports. “My engineer kept telling me on the radio, ‘You know, you can slow down a bit and save the tires,’” says Chambers, who couldn’t help marveling at the time she was making. “I remember pulling a second gap on the first lap and thinking, ‘OK, this is gonna be pretty good.’”
The win nearly made her a shoo-in for the Red Bull Ford Academy— which, given Red Bull’s reputation for cultivating champion drivers, can only make Chambers a better racer. She likewise figures to benefit from competing in Formula E, an all-electric series she joins this year that features many former F1 prospects. Time will tell whether she realizes her goal of making it all the way to the top of motorsports. But right now, there’s no doubt this woman’s got talent.
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