Chloe Chambers doesn’t dream of racing.
Instead, it’s the minutes before she steps into the car that infiltrates her REM sleep cycle. Her mind subconsciously shuffles through the motions of sitting in silence and then the dressing routine: earbuds, balaclava, helmet with the head restraint already attached. Then she slides her hands into one glove before the other. Right then left.
“My dreams are like a drama reality show. We skip the actual on-track parts, like watching ‘Drive to Survive,’” Chambers says through a laugh, causing her round wire-rimmed glasses to wobble.
At 20, the Moneygram Haas and Campos Racing F1 Academy driver has a resume that would turn most of her peers green with envy. She became the first woman to start on pole and win a race in the Castrol Toyota Racing series in 2023, joined the official Porsche junior team that same year, and won the Porsche Sprint Challenge seven times. Two years ago, she competed in the W Series, the all-female predecessor to F1 Academy, under Jenner Racing. Her junior racing career is a laundry list of regional and national championship titles.
When she stood on the top podium step in June as the first Haas-backed driver to win a race — basking in the Spanish sun as “The Star Spangled Banner” crescendoed over the loudspeakers — she added another accomplishment to her shiny CV.
Despite talk show appearances and inhuman athletic abilities, Chambers doesn’t allow racing to completely take over her life. “In any sport or in any career path, you always will need to have something outside of that,” Chambers insists. Growing up, she was able to carve out time for other pastimes while racing: Swimming laps, playing violin, and attending classes. Scenes of her on stage in an orchestra hall, a possible career path in a different lifetime, still often seep into her dreams.
When she’s not on a plane or nestled inside a race car, Chambers’ life looks a lot like a normal 20-something’s day-to-day. She is an online student at Arizona State University studying business administration and management. She watches her “fair share” of Netflix shows, goes out with friends, and watches Formula 1 races at Fuel Social Club, a club for motorsport fans near her parents’ house outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana. She’s someone you could easily imagine sitting next to in a lecture hall. It’s harder to picture her breaking a vehicle slalom world record for driving a Porsche 718 Spyder in 47.45 seconds (with just a driver’s permit) or flying to Madrid days after we spoke to pilot a Formula E car alongside 21 other female drivers.
Her surroundings contradict the lavish racing career most fans imagine: Her head rests against one of the four nondescript cream walls she calls home when she’s not in Jeddah, Singapore, or Zandvoort. She wears a fuzzy fleece half-zip sweater as she lounges in her bedroom, casually recalling her career highlights before most fellow Gen Zers have started one. “When I went to [high] school, I didn't really like to talk about racing that much, because then I'd have to explain everything,” she says. “I enjoyed being able to just be normal and have people just know me to be Chloe and not know me to be The Race Car Driver.”
Chamber’s upbringing has allowed her to keep a “normal” life within grasp. She didn’t inherit a seat. Her parents never sipped milk on the top podium step at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or crested Monte Carlo’s steep hill, bolting past the Mediterranean's aqua-blue waters. Instead, Chambers fell in love with the sport through a television screen, an affinity she shared with her British-born father.
It was Chambers — not her father, a financial advisor, or her mother, a teacher — who first expressed interest in karting at 7 years old. After one spin around a local go-kart track in upstate New York, where Chambers spent most of her childhood, she was hooked: “I just kept asking over the winter, ‘When can we go back?’” By eight, she was racing at the club track owned by Santino Ferrucci’s father, where Danica Patrick and the Andrettis grew up racing.
“It's nice to come from a family that are not drivers,” Chambers says. Her parents, Matthew and Shannon, balanced full-time jobs with managing their daughter’s career up until this season. The couple adopted Chambers from Guangdong, China when she was 11 months old before adopting her younger siblings. Her brother and sister have their own interests removed from the race track. In a family Christmas photo, Chambers sits between her siblings, the two wearing plainclothes, while she dons a racing suit. “We're not some super crazy, ultra-wealthy, or super connected racing family. We're just a normal family. I think that honestly makes things feel a little better when you do well at something, when you win a race, or when you do get a good result.”
Chambers is an anomaly: an American female racing driver who doesn’t come from a long line of drivers but has managed to enter the Formula 1 pipeline. As she traveled across the US to compete, she was consistently one of the few girls driving, and by third grade, she had polished her elevator speech, convincing her peers that “race car driver” was a real occupation for a woman.
“We would go to the library and I would always pick out racing books,” Chambers recalls. “People would always be like, ‘What are you doing?’ I remember this one guy, and he was like, ‘Why are you looking at go-karts? Those are just little cars.’ And I was like, ‘Because I race these.’” His response sums up the backlash most female racers face: “No, you don't.”
The “Why” behind F1 Academy is constantly questioned as more women enter racing. Amid noisy opinions of what the all-female series should or should not be, Chambers has a pretty good idea as one of the 15 women racing. “I think a lot of people assume that the goal of F1 Academy is to find the next Formula 1 driver, like right now,” she says. “The whole purpose of F1 Academy is to get more girls in at the lower levels.”
During the 2025 F1 Academy season, the Red Bull Ford Academy Program will back Chambers. She’s a near-perfect fit for the energy drink brand: Serious yet quick to laugh with a personality split on and off track. “On track, I'm very assertive. I'll make a pass happen,” Chambers unabashedly admits. “Off track, I’m a little bit quieter.”
Plus, she’s ready for the inevitable question: What’s your favorite Red Bull flavor? “Watermelon.”
She has a kind of maturity and self-assuredness rare in a 20-year-old. It's the kind of easy confidence that can only come via handling a race car at 150 miles per hour, I assume. She’s quick to assure me that the drive is more important than the win. In May, she qualified seventh around the Miami International Autodrome, not expecting a podium. She finished third and recalls telling herself: “There's no way I just did that. There's no way I just made up all those positions.” In comparison, her Barcelona win was “boring,” as she sprinted 6.6 seconds ahead of the field. “My podium in Miami is on par with my win in Barcelona,” Chambers proudly says.
Both her win and Miami podium will reach a mainstream audience next year after Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company releases a “Drive to Survive”-style Netflix series following the lives on and off track of F1 Academy’s 15 drivers. The series will put many of the drivers solidly in the spotlight for the first time. Despite photo ops with Formula 1 drivers and driving under the elite racing series’ 10 team emblems, F1 Academy’s gaggle of 16 to 25-year-olds still go unnoticed in the street. Chambers is conscious that her life could change, and change fast.
“Everybody says, ‘Oh, it'd be so cool to be famous,’ but then you also hear the other side of it,” she says. “I'm okay with whatever happens, to be honest. My main focus will always be whatever happens on track. I don't think I'll ever be able to not have that be my main focus.”
While the goal has always been Formula 1, Chambers is realistic. She possesses the same kind of go-with-the-flow attitude towards her career as when she speaks about the prospect of becoming famous overnight: nonchalance laced with curiosity.
“I always said Formula 1 is where I wanted to be. As I grew older and as I was progressing through motorsport, I came to the conclusion that it's not the best idea to only shoot for one thing. If you don't achieve that one super rare thing, you'll end up being disappointed,” Chambers explains. “My goals have shifted to racing at the pinnacle level of motorsport, whatever that may be.”
The 24 Hours of Daytona, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Formula 1, IndyCar, Formula E — nothing is off the table for Chambers.
Right now, F1 Academy is the best fit, and she has one goal in mind for the 2025 season: “I would win the F1 Academy championship. That would be the ideal scenario.” F1 Academy pays for the champion’s next year of racing, removing the largest obstacle in the sport: out-of-pocket costs.
She envisions herself standing on the top podium step again, a hunger that only increased after winning in Spain, and looking for her family — the first people she searches the crowd for when she’s standing tall above the race track.
Chambers sometimes dreams of those post-race moments, too.
