F1 Academy Explained

F1 Academy is an all-female single-seater championship run by Formula 1, racing on Grand Prix weekends in identical cars. It exists to solve a specific problem: not a shortage of talent, but a shortage of the mileage and the money that turn talent into a career.

What It Is

Formula 1 announced the series in November 2022 and it first raced in 2023. Susie Wolff, the last woman to take part in a Formula 1 race weekend, runs it as managing director.

Every driver uses the same machinery: a Tatuus T421 chassis, the standard Formula 4 car, with a turbocharged Autotecnica engine of around 174 horsepower on Pirelli tyres, topping out near 240 km/h. Identical cars mean the result reflects the driver, which is the entire point of a development series.

Why identical cars matterIn a series with equalised machinery there is no hiding behind the car and no excuse in it either. A team that finishes last cannot blame its budget for a slower engine. That makes F1 Academy results legible to the people who hand out the next seat.

How It Is Structured

Six teams each field three cars, giving a grid of around eighteen. The teams themselves are established junior-formula operations — ART, Campos, Rodin Carlin, MP Motorsport, Prema and Hitech — and the cars carry the colours of Formula 1 teams, which back individual entries and attach the drivers to their wider junior programmes.

Since 2024 the series has run on Formula 1 weekends, which changes what it is worth. A driver is not racing in front of a regional crowd; she is racing in front of every team principal, sponsor and broadcaster in the sport, on the same weekend and the same circuit.

The 2026 Format

The season runs to seven weekends, from Shanghai in March to Las Vegas in November. Most weekends carry two races, and 2026 adds a third at selected rounds.

Race	Grid set by	Points
Opening Race	Each driver’s second-fastest qualifying lap	Fastest lap point, no pole point
Race 1	Reverse grid	Top eight score, 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1
Race 2	Qualifying order	Formula 1’s points system, top ten

The new Opening Race appears first at the Canadian Grand Prix weekend at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and again at the Circuit of the Americas. Setting its grid by second-fastest lap rewards consistency over a single banzai effort, and gives every driver a third race’s worth of mileage at the rounds where it runs.

The Problem It Is Actually Solving

Junior single-seater racing is expensive, and a seat is usually bought rather than won. That hits drivers without a family fortune or an early manufacturer contract hardest, and it has historically hit women hardest of all — not because of the driving but because the money and the testing miles were never there in the first place.

F1 Academy attacks that directly. Formula 1 subsidises entries, the Formula 1 teams attach their names and their junior programmes to individual cars, and the series guarantees testing and track time that a privately funded campaign in an equivalent series would not include.

Where It Leads

The intended path runs from karting through F1 Academy into Formula 3 and then Formula 2, which is the established route to a Formula 1 seat. The series is deliberately positioned at Formula 4 level, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination — a driver who dominates it is expected to leave it.

Whether that pipeline delivers a Formula 1 driver is a question that needs another decade to answer. What it has already delivered is a group of drivers with real mileage, real television exposure and real relationships inside the paddock, which is more than the previous arrangement produced.