A 17-year-old Swede gets the Austin wild card, and she is openly racing for a 2027 seat

Alexia Danielsson is 17, Swedish, and will make her F1 Academy debut in Austin next month as TeamViewer’s wild card. She has not bothered to dress up what the weekend is for. She is there to get a seat for 2027.

The fastest route she has taken so far is the Nordic one

Danielsson started in single seaters in 2022 and has come up through Nordic 4, where she took her first win last season, and the Porsche Sprint Challenge Scandinavia, where she won on her debut in 2025. This year she has been racing in the F4 CEZ Championship, scoring points as a rookie.

She is also a development driver with More Than Equal, the programme set up to find and support a future female Formula 1 driver.

Second fastest overall at the Navarra rookie test

The route to this wild card ran through the F1 Academy Rookie Test at the Circuito de Navarra in Spain. Twenty drivers took part, after three days of a new rookie training camp run with Loughborough University.

Danielsson set the second fastest time overall. That is the line in her season that got her this seat, and it is worth noting that she did it against drivers who have been in these cars before.

The Hitech number 45, in a livery about somebody else

She will drive the number 45 run by Hitech, carrying a special livery for TeamViewer’s Forward Together campaign, which features 250 women from a range of professions.

Wild card entries in F1 Academy are sponsor-backed one-off drives, which means the car she gets is a real one and the weekend is a real weekend, with qualifying, a reverse grid race and a feature. Austin has an extra opening race as well, because of the Jeddah cancellation, so she gets three races rather than two.

She said out loud what the weekend is for

Most young drivers in this position give you something safe about enjoying the experience. Danielsson gave the honest version.

“My main goal for the weekend is to learn as much as I possibly can,” she said. “I’m also competing for a place on the grid for the full season next year, so if I get that opportunity, I want to be as prepared as I can be.”

That is a seventeen year old describing a job interview, and being clear eyed about it.

The previous wild card had a harder time of it

Zoe Florescu, the Romanian who took the Zandvoort wild card in August, is the useful comparison. She qualified seventh, which is a strong result for a driver seeing the car for the first time, and was then disqualified for a technical infringement.

That is the risk in these drives. One weekend, no test mileage to speak of, unfamiliar tyres, and everything you do is being read as evidence. Florescu did enough to be selected for the rookie test alongside Danielsson afterwards, which suggests the people who matter were watching the lap time rather than the classification.

Our interest: the wild card has become a proper entry route

When F1 Academy introduced wild cards they read like a marketing device, a way of giving a partner brand a car for a weekend. They have quietly turned into something else. A driver who is quick in one gets a rookie test, a driver who is quick in the rookie test gets a wild card, and a driver who is quick in a wild card gets talked about for a full season.

Danielsson has now done two of those three steps in about six weeks. What happens in Austin decides whether she gets the third.

Austin runs three races on 24 and 25 October

The Austin round supports the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas, and it is also where Alisha Palmowski can wrap up the championship. Our piece on the title maths is here.

Her full profile is on her driver page, and our earlier coverage of the women coming through the junior ladder is here.