In the 372 days between her terrifying incident in a USF Juniors race last April and her F1 Academy debut as the series’ Miami round wild card last month, Ava Dobson faced a tremendous personal battle to recover. The 16-year-old opened up to Feeder Series on the mental and physical effects of her accident and how she persevered through a ‘tough year’ to capitalise on her biggest opportunity yet.

By George Sanderson

On 26 April 2024, Ava Dobson sat in her car to prepare for a race like many others. 

It was a sunny, unseasonably hot spring morning outside Birmingham, Alabama, where Dobson, then 15, was contesting the first race of USF Juniors’ second round of the season. It was her first full campaign in not only the entry-level North American championship but in any single-seater series.

It was a season that, as she came to realise moments later, she would not complete.

On lap 18 of 20, Jay Howard Driver Development racer Dobson, running near the back of the field, swooped through Turn 3 and rose over the crest just before the high-speed Turn 4 right-hander. Just ahead of her was Bruno Ribeiro, stationary in the middle of the track after being pushed wide and spinning. The cars ahead of Dobson reacted late to the helpless DEForce Racing machine, but she had nowhere to go.

“If I’m being really honest, I can’t remember anything that happened,” Dobson said. “I can’t remember the crash, I can’t remember what happened afterwards, I don’t know who I talked to. It’s really weird.”

As far as Dobson understood, she had suffered minor injuries to her pinky finger, chest and back after the impact. If it were up to her, she would have been straight back in the car at the first opportunity.

Her father, private equity executive Michael Dobson, advised otherwise.

“I didn’t want to stop racing for the year, but my dad was like, ‘It’s not worth it because if you were to get injured again, it would just get worse’.”

What the Milwaukee-born driver described at the time as ‘whiplash’ turned out to be a serious concussion. Dobson was sidelined from racing for two months following the accident, which destroyed her acr and put an end to her USF Juniors season.

She said she stopped working out – “I realise now I probably shouldn’t have,” she adds – and mostly stayed at home. At the time, Dobson was suffering from sickness due to her concussion, which made physical activity increasingly difficult.

When her illness got serious enough that she visited the emergency room, doctors said there wasn’t much she could to speed up her recovery from her concussion either. They advised her to stay off her phone and avoid loud environments. 

Dobson still went to racetracks sometimes, but the pain was too great. 

“Listening to the cars, with my regular ears, would hurt my head so bad,” she told Feeder Series. “I literally couldn’t be outside. When it was the early stages [of recovery], the sun hurt my head so bad. I remember when we went to Connecticut or something for my dad’s business stuff, I literally would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to throw up.”

It wasn’t just the physical recovery that was proving a challenge. Dobson – who turns 17 next week – also had to take time away from the sport she loved and the people within it. She felt ‘hopeless’, she said.

“It lowkey made me depressed because I’m not around racing,” she told Feeder Series. “Obviously I’d grown up with all those people, so I’m not around my friends, not around people that I know personally on a different level. I got into a bad mental space for a while and obviously that’s really tough. It took me a really long time to get out of it.”

For several days after the incident, Dobson struggled to sleep. She was experiencing what she described as a ‘PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] response’ wherein the incident kept replaying in her head when she tried to fall asleep, causing her to ‘wake up in a cold sweat’.

“I would literally wake up in the middle of the night and it was just like me hitting the guy and then I would wake up, and it happened the entire night.” 

Eventually the sleep disturbances stopped, Dobson said, and she lost all recollection of the specifics of the incident. But the memory of its occurrence still lingered.

“I haven’t talked about this much because I feel so cringe, but when I went to Donington [Park] for the first time and I saw the hills, I was like, ‘Oh my god’. It all just kind of freaked me out. Even when I got back into the car, the first time I went to a hilly track, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m freaking out’. I’m good now, but sometimes I still second-guess. You hold your breath a little longer. It’s those little things.”

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Dobson returned to competitive racing action on 27 July 2024, almost three months to the day after her incident at Barber. This time, she was with a different team, in a different car, on a different continent. Racing with Velocity Racing Development (VRD) in England’s GB4 Championship, Dobson was at Silverstone for the first of two appearances she would make in the series in 2024.

Dobson finished last in the first race and got away slowly at the start of the second, but then her fortunes began to turn around. She recovered well in that race to take home ninth, ahead of three other finishers and one retiree, and finished 11th in the third race. She returned for the following round at Donington Park and battled her fear of undulating circuits, finishing 14th twice and 15th once.

Those encouraging performances in 2024 prompted her to return for this year, this time with Arden Motorsport, who previously helped run VRD’s entry in GB3.

As she raced more overseas, she had to move away from her home outside Milwaukee to live in Derby in the UK. The move from the Midwest to the Midlands didn’t quite go to plan.

“I got really sick in the first week I was there,” she told Feeder Series. “I had hayfever or something. It was so bad. I couldn’t breathe. It was just a really bad situation. I think I set off the fire alarm like three times. Not on purpose – I don’t even know how it went off because I didn’t even cook anything!”

Living arrangements aside, Dobson said she appreciated the ‘more professional’ standard of racing in Europe.

“I feel like I’m being taken more seriously. I feel like my team actually believes in me,” she said. “I’m not being held back because I’m a girl or something. I definitely like that a lot. I think the competition is obviously so good.”

“It wasn’t just drivers and stuff. I felt like it was kind of going everywhere. I feel like I almost had to prove myself that ‘Okay, I’m good enough to be here’, and obviously I was brand new to cars.”

Dobson has returned to a new-look GB4 Championship this season. The series boasts a grid that has doubled in size and surged in competitiveness. A record 25 drivers took to the track in the new Tatuus MSV GB4-025 in the season opener at Donington Park, with just 1.065 seconds separating the top 20 drivers in qualifying. Dobson was 13th in that pack, 0.827 seconds off pole position.

Dobson secured 12th- and 10th-place finishes in the opening two races of the season before contact in the reverse-grid race three left her 23rd. At Silverstone, Dobson finished 21st in race one before taking 14th- and 13th-place finishes in the next two races. She also claimed four extra points for gaining four positions in the reverse-grid race.

At Oulton Park, Dobson secured her best finish of the season so far with eighth place in the first race of the weekend from 16th on the grid, but luck wasn’t on her side for the other two races. An incident with Megan Bruce caused her to retire from race two on the final lap, with Bruce receiving a five-place grid penalty for causing the collision. Dobson finished 19th in a rain-affected reverse-grid race three.

“I am pretty happy with [my results],” Dobson said. “It just bothers me that I know I’m so much faster than what I’m doing right now.”

Dobson also has a benchmark within Arden in her teammate, 17-year-old Leon Wilson. The Yorkshireman has finished seven of the nine races inside the top 10, with the other two results being a retirement from the season opener and an 18th place in race three at Oulton Park as he fended off Dobson on the final lap.

“It’s good to have someone I can lean on almost to keep pushing myself to be better,” she said about Wilson. “That is definitely helping me a lot, especially because I’ve never been at these tracks like Oulton, Snetterton, Brands [Hatch].”

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For much of her junior single-seater career, Dobson has competed in front of small audiences in relatively obscure series. That all changed last month.

Dobson was announced as F1 Academy’s wild card entry for the third round of the season at Miami International Autodrome, one of two events held in the United States. The wild card programme offers one young woman per round, usually a driver local to the host country or region, a chance to join the grid in the Hitech team’s third car.

Dobson knew about her F1 Academy wild card opportunity for ‘two or three months’ before it happened, she told Feeder Series. “They had offered it up to us, and obviously that was a really big deal,” she added.

Having been approached by F1 Academy for the opportunity, Dobson raced for Hitech GP and represented multinational bank and financial services company Morgan Stanley. But the American had a tough weekend from the very beginning on Friday.

The fire extinguisher went off in free practice one, limiting her to nine laps – roughly half the total of the other runners. In free practice two, meanwhile, she caused a collision with Lia Block, which earned her a three-place penalty for race one.

“It happened because I’m not used to that car, because the braking is so much longer than the GB4. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, it will stop’, and it didn’t stop!”

An incoming rain shower Friday evening meant that the series’ 30-minute qualifying session essentially adopted a one-shot qualifying structure. Drivers had to set their fast laps after just one warm-up lap before conditions got too treacherous.

Dobson’s first flying lap put her 15th. On her second, she improved by approximately a second in the first sector alone before rain set in on the back straight, forcing her to back off.

With her penalty for the collision with Block on Friday, Dobson started 18th but finished 13th of 15 finishers. Dobson said her race ‘was good’ but added that a car problem held her back from advancing any further forward.

The second race of the weekend was cancelled after a few formation laps because of the adverse weather conditions. Dobson said other drivers’ incidents in the wet conditions could have given her a few crucial free positions from 18th on the grid. 

“I was hoping we would go [racing],” she said. “I just feel like I didn’t really get to show my skill, but I feel that, overall, I definitely did as best as I could for the situation I had.”

The second Miami race has been rescheduled to Montréal later this month, but Dobson will not be competing in the postponed event. In F1 Academy, participating in more than one race weekend counts as doing a season, Dobson explained, meaning she would only have one more year in which she could compete in the championship. 

Like many of those who make use of the wild card programme, Dobson is hoping to return to F1 Academy in a full-time seat in 2026. She could advance towards doing so by winning a prize for being the highest-placed female driver in the GB4 Championship this season, but she faces competition from four other eligible drivers. As it stands, Dobson is third among them, just nine points behind current leader Bruce.

This prize grants GB4’s highest-placed female driver after the season finale in October a £50,000 contribution to be used towards a seat in F1 Academy in 2026. That amount has increased from the £30,000 given last year to Elite Motorsport’s Alisha Palmowski, who sits fourth in the F1 Academy drivers’ standings as a member of Campos Racing with support from Red Bull Racing. Palmowski, 18, is also comfortably the series’ top rookie.

“I think she laid a good base-ground for us,” Dobson says about Palmowski. “She showed us that we can do this and get there. We just have to prove it.”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography