The Motor Sport interview

Jamie Chadwick, triple W Series champion, has been racing since she was 11 years old, starting in karts and moving to Ginetta Juniors in 2013 having turned down a trial with the England hockey team. In 2015 she was GT4 champion in the British GT Championship, the youngest ever winner. Three years later she became MRF Challenge champion in Asia.

She began collecting points for her FIA Super Licence in the F3 Asian series and in late 2022 Andretti Global signed her up for their Indy NXT team where she is now in her second season and making headlines with a victory at Road America, the first woman in the series to take pole and a win on a road course. She’s aiming to move up to IndyCar and at the end of September will test the Andretti IndyCar for the first time. She is also now the F1 Academy adviser for the Williams F1 team.

Chadwick accepts that being a standard-bearer for women in motor racing is part of the job, although you get the sense that she would prefer to simply let her driving do the talking. Motor Sport caught up with her ahead of the Indy NXT race at Mid-Ohio – where she scored another top 10 result. The Indy NXT season finale is on September 15.

Motor Sport: Let’s focus on your second season in Indy NXT with Andretti Global. You made headlines as the first woman to win a race there since 2010, starting from pole and leading every lap. Are you getting to grips with the cars and the circuits now?

Jamie Chadwick: Well… we’re getting there, we’ve had a couple of really good races but some races have got away from us. I went into this year with the goal of winning a race and, now that weight is off, I believe we can be up there. It took time to sink in. I had to watch it back. Sometimes you’ve done it and you still don’t feel like it was real. When I look at the season so far [after nine rounds of the championship], I do think we deserve to be fighting more consistently at the sharper end. The way the series pans out this year there are a lot of oval tracks coming towards the end of the season. They’re a big component of the racing here, and another challenge which is new to me. So yes it’s going well, better than last year, but there are still a lot of things I need to get right before I can put a marker down on the series.

MS: Are those ovals intimidating for a driver coming from Europe and racing close to the barriers at high speeds?

JC: They can be, yes, but what’s nice is that you’re getting a lot of experience in a lower-powered car before turning up at the Indy 500 as a rookie. So that helps before, hopefully, moving up to IndyCar. A lot of the ovals we race are the shorter ones, so the speeds are lower and the style and the technique are a bit different from what you will have on the superspeedways. We have our first superspeedway at Nashville this year so that will more accurately replicate the experience you will have in IndyCar at tracks like Texas and Indy. It’s a challenge, yes, but I enjoy that. Ovals are a different skill set, but you learn a lot and it’s good that I can prepare for the big speedways in Indy NXT before the step up to IndyCar.

We go to the Iowa Speedway next which is just 0.875 of a mile and fast laps in around 18sec. They call it the world’s fastest short track. Another challenge.

MS: How much help and advice have you been given to help you manage these challenges?

JC: Quite a lot actually but in the end you just have to go out there and prove yourself. The car is a big factor on the short ovals, and you can dictate the direction in which you take the car in terms of set-up, and how you drive it, and a lot of that you have to learn yourself. Having said that, it has been really helpful to have had Michael Andretti there last year on the ovals, leaning into the cockpit, talking to me in the car. When you have someone like that, who knows the ovals better than most, it definitely helps.

MS: You dominated the W Series, winning three titles between 2019 and 2022, and before that you’d already won the MRF championship and won the GT4 class in the British GT series in 2015 as a teenager. How does it feel not to be on the podium all the time?

“The level of competition is different from what I’ve had before”

JC: Different obviously but, honestly, Indy NXT has been a really nice new challenge. It’s given me something to work for, and it’s really taken me somewhere where I hadn’t been for a while and that’s a positive thing. It’s not just the racing, it’s also the ‘social pressure’ in a series that has such a big audience, on TV, at the tracks, on social media, and the level of competition I’m experiencing now is different too from what I’ve had before.

Last year it was tough at the beginning, but I knew what the level was going to be. I knew what I needed to do, and how to get there, but it took time to do that. I just love that challenge. There’s no more rewarding feeling than going from somewhere you don’t want to be, working hard at it, and then achieving what you set out to achieve. That’s the motivation for me. We’ve had two top-five finishes and five top-10 results [six top-10s after Mid-Ohio; Chadwick finished seventh], the win at Road America, and we’re running sixth in the championship [sitting fifth as we went to press].

MS: A lot of drivers from Europe who go to race in America never come back. They like the racing, the lifestyle, the opportunities. How different is the racing scene over there compared to Europe?

JC: It is different, yes, and I love the racing. I’m really enjoying the whole IndyCar scene. It’s a lot of fun, the culture is very different, everyone loves their racing here, so you get a lot of support from the fans. Being in America has been enjoyable for me because I’ve had the chance to go to places and tracks that I never would have been able to experience without this opportunity. So, just from a life point of view, it’s all been fun and exciting. From a career point of view I’m not yet totally sure but I know a lot of people have come over here and stayed, and I can see why they’ve done that. I get that entirely, and the opportunities drivers have here are huge. Now I’m on a very similar focused pathway and wanting to achieve the same opportunities, so yes I can see it’s good, career-wise, from that point of view.

MS: OK, so what now is the immediate ambition having had a good season thus far? Are you set on the idea of moving up to IndyCar from here?

“We have a lot of oval races coming up so there’s pressure to perform”

JC: It’s just too early to talk about that and one victory doesn’t guarantee anything. We have a lot of oval races coming up in the rest of the year so there’s a lot of pressure on me to make sure we can perform well enough to justify a move up to IndyCar. All the top drivers want to move up, the rookies are very competitive, and there are more Europeans coming over, so there is still a lot for me to achieve before I can justify going further into IndyCar. It is, however, very much the goal and the focus, so let’s see how the rest of the season goes. There’s pressure on me now to perform but Andretti Global has been massively supportive and I’ve learnt how to be more relaxed, and not let it get to me. I’d like to have a base here. There’s a lot of travelling and I’m spending most of my time away from the races in hotels and Airbnbs.

MS: At Laguna Seca, one of the great tracks, the field was incredibly evenly matched, a train of cars from which it was tough to make a break. That kind of close competition must be another challenge of Indy NXT?

JC: A wonderful circuit, yes, and we did two races there on the same weekend, both top-10 results for us, but we haven’t been as good at moving through the pack as some of the other drivers. In the second race it was better, moving forward through the field for sixth place, being smarter with the push-to-pass facility, making the difference that takes you forward. It’s been frustrating. We need to get better at it, but it’s all stuff I’m still learning and I’m enjoying the battles, the close racing, and we’re getting there.

MS: There are some great old-school tracks on the calendar. Road America, Mid-Ohio and Laguna as just three highlights. Are you enjoying these places that are so different to the open spaces of most European tracks?

JC: Yeah, I agree, these places are amazing, such awesome race tracks. I think if Formula 1 came to Laguna Seca, for example, it would just be incredibly spectacular. We are spoilt here. These are the best tracks I’ve ever driven, but there’s not much room for any mistakes so they are very challenging, with a lot of undulation, high-speed corners, and very physical. This is all part of the character of the sport here and it’s one of the reasons why so many of the drivers love to come and race here.

MS: The elephant in the room is always this ‘first-woman’ thing, the ever-present subject of being a woman in what has been traditionally a man’s world. The Audi Sport engineer Leena Gade told me she gets fed-up with it but it never goes away.

JC: Yeah, that’s right, and I do hate this ‘first woman to win’ chat, or whatever, like after my win at Road America, because for me it’s such a negative thing. All it proves is that there haven’t been many women doing what I’m doing now and that’s not a good thing, and not something we should be proud of. At the same time it’s interesting and exciting because it shines a light on all the desire the sport now has to see more women getting involved and competing.

There’s a lot of initiative out there, a lot of things we are doing to encourage more women into the sport, and ultimately to get them to the top level. So that’s the really positive thing to come from all the chat. I think it will fuel the role-model culture that we’re fostering and will encourage more young girls to turn on their TVs at home to see women competing in motor racing. They will realise there are opportunities out there and ultimately try it for themselves, find their way into the sport in one way or another.

MS: Did the W Series achieve what it set out to do and is the new F1 Academy the way forward from here?

“The next challenge is how we get more women into F3 and F2”

JC: From a personal point of view I think W Series succeeded in that I wouldn’t be talking to you today in my Andretti shirt ahead of practice at Mid-Ohio if I hadn’t had that experience, that success. I would not be racing at all so in that sense it gave me, and many other drivers, a huge opportunity. The new F1 Academy has similar principles and ambitions in place and is a little bit ahead of W Series because of the relationship it has with the Formula 1 teams – but there’s still quite a long way to go before really finding the best pathway for a female driver to go into Formula 1 solely on merit. The next challenge for the Academy is how we get more women into Formula 3 and Formula 2 because that’s where all the best young drivers are coming from. So it’s now all about how we get to the point where they are coming up from those two categories to make their way to Formula 1.

MS: Hybrid has finally arrived in IndyCar. What is Andretti, and the other teams and drivers, saying about this new development?

JC: There are still a lot of unknowns going into a new era. There’s been a lot of testing, mainly on the ovals, but it’s hard to know if it might favour some teams more than others. Most people reckon this is a pretty cool new direction and evolution for Indycars. It’s very positive. The more IndyCar develops and evolves will be good for the sport I think. The fans are still going to see a great race, there will still be plenty of noise and drama, and there will still be lots of opportunities to win for teams and drivers who get the strategy right. It’s unpredictable; that’s the beauty of IndyCar.

MS: You raced at the Goodwood Members’ Meeting in April. Is that something you’d like to do when the IndyCar calendar allows?

JC: I loved the event. It’s a lot of fun, and the first time I’d driven the Goodwood circuit. I was out in two very different cars, a 1965 Ford Mustang – that was a bit of handful – and a Rover SD1, which was a bit more compliant. It’s amazing how hard they race these historic cars, really ragging it, and it was great that we were all using sustainable fuel which is a fantastic new direction. It was just so cool to be racing with people I’ve always looked up to and admired but had never imagined I’d be out there with all those big names from the sport. So yeah, it was a great experience.”