Alexia Danielsson F1 Academy Driver Profile: The Swedish Wild Card Racing for a 2027 Seat
Alexia Danielsson is the newest name on the F1 Academy grid, and she has not pretended the Austin weekend is anything other than an audition. The 17 year old Swede takes the TeamViewer wild card at the Circuit of the Americas in October, driving the number 45 run by Hitech, after finishing second fastest of twenty drivers at the series’ rookie test.
Alexia Danielsson: Fast Facts
- Nationality: Swedish
- Age: 17
- Series in 2026: F4 CEZ Championship, plus an F1 Academy wild card at Austin
- Wild card team: Hitech
- Car number: 45
- Programme: More Than Equal development driver
Career path: the Nordic route into single seaters
Danielsson moved into single seaters in 2022 and built her record in Scandinavia rather than on the more travelled European junior ladder. She raced in Nordic 4, where she took her first single seater win last season, and in the Porsche Sprint Challenge Scandinavia, where she won on her debut in 2025.
For 2026 she stepped outside Scandinavia and into the F4 CEZ Championship, scoring points in what is her rookie season in that series. She is also a development driver with More Than Equal, the programme set up to find and support a future female Formula 1 driver.
The rookie test at Navarra is what got her the seat
F1 Academy ran its rookie test at the Circuito de Navarra in Spain in September, with twenty drivers taking part after three days of a new rookie training camp run in partnership with Loughborough University. Danielsson set the second fastest time overall, against a field that included drivers with previous mileage in the car.
That result turned into the Austin wild card within weeks, which is the route the series has quietly built: quick in a test, then a wild card, then a conversation about a full season.
Austin 2026: three races and a livery about other people
The Austin round on 24 and 25 October supports the United States Grand Prix and runs three races rather than two, because F1 Academy added an opening race there after the Jeddah round was cancelled. Danielsson gets qualifying, an opening race, a reverse grid race and a feature.
Her car carries a special livery for TeamViewer’s Forward Together campaign, which features 250 women from a range of professions.
What she says about it
Where most drivers in a one off drive talk about enjoying the experience, Danielsson named the objective. “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.”
What to watch
Wild cards are unforgiving. One weekend, almost no mileage, unfamiliar tyres, and every lap read as evidence. Zoe Florescu, the wild card at Zandvoort in August, qualified seventh and was then disqualified for a technical infringement, and still did enough to be picked for the rookie test alongside Danielsson.
For Danielsson the measure in Austin will not be the classification. It will be the gap to the regulars in qualifying.