F1 Academy Driver Chloe Chong Is Putting It All on Track
The up-and-coming racing driver is learning to trust herself.
After a year away, Chloe Chong is currently participating in her second season with F1 Academy: the prestigious Formula One-backed series designed to get more women into professional motorsport. The 18-year-old Brit is one of only 18 female drivers from across the world to snag a seat in the 2025 F1 Academy season. For her, it’s an opportunity to practise not overthinking.
“We learn all these techniques and all these things to do, but actually, when we get to a race weekend, the main thing is to be able to apply it—and the best way of applying it is by trusting yourself, trusting your instincts,” Chong reflects. “Because as a driver, once you trust your instincts, everything kind of fades away—and you’re able to really maximize everything in the car, because you’ve got that feeling of being on the edge. But if you start overtrying, that’s when all the mistakes come in.”
Chong fell in love with motorsport by watching Formula One with her dad when she was little. (Her parents are Canadian but moved to Britain before Chong was born. She considers Canada her second home, often travelling to Vancouver and Toronto to visit extended family.)
“My dad was always a big fan,” she says of the pinnacle of motorsport. “He’d leave it on in the background when I was younger, and I absorbed it.”
She started racing go karts “as soon as it was possible” (which means around the age of five) and worked her way up through the ranks, competing in national and international karting championships. From there, she attended a Ferrari scouting camp, which led her to get signed by F1 Academy.
Under the helm of Susie Wolff—a former development driver for the Williams Formula One team and the wife of Toto Wolff, the team principal and CEO of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team—F1 Academy launched in 2023. Chong was one of its debut drivers (and its youngest), securing six points-scoring finishes in her first year. In 2024, she left to race in the British F4, then returned to F1 Academy for 2025. So far this season, with eight races behind her, she is sitting in 11th place with 11 points. Point scoring is crucial, because F1 Academy only lets drivers stay in the program for two years. Consistent performance is the best way for Chong to increase her chances of being signed by a team in another racing league.
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“It’s all about the results,” she says. “I’ve got to start performing better to enable myself to move on to the next step of my career and to show companies that I’m on an onwards path, and I’m going up in the ranks. So the main goal for me is the next race, the next session.”
The F1 Academy structure is purposely different from the Formulas. For one thing, all the cars are the same. Unlike in Formula One, where each team designs a proprietary race car (within certain budgetary and engineering limits), F1 Academy evens the field by giving each driver the same piece of equipment. Companies—either Formula One teams or external stakeholders who want in on the action—can then sponsor a driver. This year, Chong is driving for Charlotte Tilbury.
Another F1 Academy differentiator is the actual race structure, which was designed to maximize the drivers’ time on track. Seven racetracks around the world host two F1 Academy races each (they typically run about 30 minutes in length), giving the drivers two chances to score points every weekend; similar to Formula One, points are only given to the top 10 finishers. To magnify the league’s exposure, all of the F1 Academy races take place over the same weekends as Formula One.
“You need to start every weekend fresh,” Chong says. “You need to have the same aggressive mindset every single time, no matter what happened before.”
For her, that means quieting her brain before strapping into the car. “Sometimes I literally am thinking about nothing,” she says. “People ask, ‘What are you thinking about?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know because I’m just so zoned out’—but in a good way, so that when I’m actually in my races, I’m not overstressing. I’m focused on the feeling that I have in the car.”
There’s that self-trust again. It’s sure to serve her well.
