A Wildcard’s Record-Breaking Weekend: Chiara Bättig F1 Academy Silverstone Debut
- therookiereporters
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
F1 Academy’s first weekend in Silverstone came with an unexpected debut performance. This article covers the latest F1 Academy wildcard Chiara Bättig’s British GP weekend.
The 16-year old Swiss was born in Lucerne in 2010 and started her journey in local karting competitions, while she was 8. She won the Swiss Championship 3-times consecutively between 2022-2024 and became the youngest champion of the series. In addition to her national success, Bättig was also invited to Champions of the Future Academy Program International Series of F1 Academy Discover Your Drive, in which she finished runner-up in OK-N senior category.
After 7 years of karting, the Swiss driver moved up to single seaters and was selected to the Red Bull Junior Team. In late 2025, she debuted in the F4 Saudi Arabia Championship with multiple point-scoring finishes and continued her journey in the Formula Winter Series afterwards. Bättig is currently competing in F4 British Championship with Hitech and the same team, in collaboration with Wella Professionals, offered her the first taste of F1 Academy as a wildcard, on the track she scored a podium finish a few weeks ago.
The young Swiss didn’t waste any time on making a name for herself. In her first ever F1 Academy session, she shocked everyone by topping the Free Practice session on Friday. In doing so, she became the first wildcard driver and also the youngest driver to finish on top of an F1 Academy session.
Later on the same day, Bättig proved that her Free Practice pace was no fluke. The 16-year old topped the 30-minutes Qualifying session as well, once again becoming the first wildcard and the youngest driver to qualify on pole for the Sunday’s Feature Race. Her debut weekend was off to a perfect start.
Sunday’s polesitter faced her first racing challenge on Saturday, starting 8th in the Reverse Grid Race. Bättig’s take off wasn’t good enough compared to her rivals around and she fell out of the points-paying positions early on. However, the young Swiss had the pace to recover her bad start and to set some fastest laps, as she slowly went up in the order. Her highlight of the race came, when she made a late launch into Brooklands corner on Alba Larsen, which secured her 8th place finish just behind Ava Dobson and Lisa Billard. This result earned her first point in F1 Academy with a pole position start awaiting next.
Sunday morning came with one question in everyone’s mind: “Can a wildcard driver actually win a race in F1 Academy?”. The answer was up to the youngest polesitter Chiara Bättig for the next 13 laps of her racing career. However, her last challenge of the weekend started similarly to Saturday. Despite a rather better start, she lost the lead to the home hero Alisha Palmowski and followed her through the opening laps. Even after the safety car period, she didn’t leave the chase and kept the gap under one second, constantly putting her experienced rival under pressure until the end of the race.
Although she gave her best efforts, she didn’t get a chance to make a move to take back the lead and settled for second place, which was already enough to make history. This podium finish made her the first wildcard podium sitter in 3 years of F1 Academy and she also brought Hitech their first podium of the competition. The home race winner and fellow Red Bull Academy driver Alisha Palmowski also gave the young driver credit for giving her hell out on track.
In summary, Chiara Bättig made a record-breaking debut in F1 Academy at Silverstone. With her #6 Wella Professionals car she played a big part in Hitech’s best weekend yet in F1 Academy, scoring around half of the team’s points during the weekend. We’ll see how the young Swiss’ career shapes up in the future, but if she keeps up like this for the rest of her 2026 season, Red Bull may have a promising protege in their hands to put in their car for next year’s F1 Academy campaign.
Article written by Emre Albas © Emre Albas 2026
