The USF Pro 2000 title race has had several contenders emerge over the 2025 season, but Pabst Racing’s Max Garcia has risen above the pack through his pace and sheer consistency. With three rounds left, it’s now or never for the drivers pursuing him in the standings to rein him in. 

By Michael McClure and Marco Albertini

Saturday, June 21, is among the hottest days of the year in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where the second half of the 2025 USF Pro 2000 season officially begins. In just a handful of weeks, the series will crown the 35th champion in its history and its third under the USF Pro 2000 banner, and one title favourite has emerged.

Points leader Max Garcia earned pole for both of the first two races of the weekend, both held on Saturday, having blitzed qualifying on Friday afternoon. The 16-year-old Floridian had been the class of the field during the season, but in recent rounds, he had relied on his consistency to carry him while other drivers stole the headline results.

Not on that Saturday. Garcia wins both races by leading every lap from pole position. He extends his championship lead from 43 points to 74 and puts himself on pole for Sunday’s race too by posting the best second-fastest lap across the weekend.

By the time the temperature crests and begins slipping to a more comfortable 30ºC in the evening, the question looming over the paddock is no longer Who can defeat Max Garcia? but rather Can anyone defeat Max Garcia?

After Sunday’s third race, the Pabst Racing driver’s championship lead stood at 72 points, with 198 still on offer with three rounds remaining. Four wins in 12 races and no finishes lower than fourth enabled him to establish a large cushion over the rest of the field heading into this weekend’s round at Mid-Ohio.

It’s a position the 16-year-old, USF Pro 2000’s youngest driver by more than a year, knows all too well.

Last year in USF2000, Garcia edged out Pabst teammate Sam Corry for his maiden single-seater title by 73 points, with an end-of-year scorecard of five wins and no finishes lower than seventh. He was the youngest champion in series history and among its most consistent, and he graduated to USF Pro 2000 as part of a large and talented crop of rookies all seeking title glory.

When he turned up to his home circuit of St Petersburg in March, the highly rated Garcia finished second on his series debut. He then won race two with a decisive move on Alessandro de Tullio on lap 10 to take the lead, after which he held off Mac Clark until the chequered flag.

“Every weekend, I just show up to run up front and do the best performance I can do with the car I have and try to help my team make it better,” Garcia tells Feeder Series afterwards in the St Petersburg paddock. “I’m just really looking forward to the next 16 races.”

That weekend served as a baptism by fire for the USF Pro 2000 grid following an increase to the cars’ power output. A boost in the maximum rev limit on road and street courses from 7850 to 8350 rpm over the winter also boosted horsepower output by 10 hp at the top end and 40 hp on the lower end, cutting lap times by more than a second. 

The added power increased speeds around the circuit, and half of the drivers on the grid crashed during at least one session – including race one winner De Tullio and fellow frontrunners Ariel Elkin and Jacob Douglas.

Still, despite being a rookie, Garcia seemed to have no trouble with the more powerful version of the bigger car. “Some of the flat-out corners are easier now,” he explains. “Last year, this year it was a little sketchy out of the corners, but it’s just really fun. And you didn’t have wheelspin out of the corners like last year.”

Clark, who finished fourth and second in the two races, added, “The one plus that I’ve noticed as a driver is actually, in the corners, choosing the right gear. The RPM range affects what gear you’re in a lot, and so there are places on the calendar this year where we’ll go and the gear will be a little bit lower, sometimes higher. The top speed doesn’t change that much, but definitely in the [middle range], we’re a little bit more racy and the gearing’s different.”

USF Pro 2000: Best race lap comparison	2024	2025
St Petersburg	1:09.6979, Nikita Johnson, R2	Alessandro De Tullio, 1:08.5866, R1
NOLA	1:31.4282, Nikita Johnson, R2	Max Garcia, 1:30.3323, R1
Indianapolis	1:22.7788, Simon Sikes, R2	Alessandro de Tullio, 1:21.3649, R2
Road America	2:02.7319, Frankie Mossman, R1	Max Garcia, 2:01.8536, R3

Clark would continue to pressure Garcia throughout the season, but in the early races, Garcia’s clearest rival – and the only other driver to have held the points lead this year – was De Tullio. 

Following a partial campaign in last year’s USF Pro 2000 season, De Tullio joined Turn 3 Motorsports, who took Lochie Hughes to the 2024 title. He won the season-opening race at St Petersburg before taking two victories at NOLA to establish himself as a serious threat to Garcia’s points lead. Only an accident in the second race of the year, which Garcia won, substantially set the two apart in points and overall performance.

That De Tullio would even be on the grid seemed unlikely a little over a year ago. After finishing fourth in USF Juniors in 2022, the American driver of Italian-Argentine descent returned to karting – where he had burnished his trade as both driver and coach – for a year and a half. 

“It’s difficult because in Juniors, we were on a tight budget,” De Tullio explains. “So towards the end of the season, we had some budget problems. That showed a little bit on the performance side of things. I won the three races at VIR and had good performances after that, then all of a sudden took a big decline. That just shows budget is really important to have this good support and people backing you.”

De Tullio, now 19, finally made his return to single-seaters at Mid-Ohio one year ago with BN Racing and put the car solidly in the midfield despite having no testing. The three rounds he contested make him ineligible for rookie status, though his experience advantage until this point has been limited.

“The target’s very simple. It’s just to win races,” he says. “We’re not going to win them all possibly, but to be there consistently up front and get all the points and just be there in the title fight. With this team, I know we could be in the title fight, but I have to do my job.”

De Tullio’s assuredness, however, hit a stumbling block with his miserable weekend in Indianapolis, where he finished outside the top 10 in all three races. He bounced back with second at Indianapolis Raceway Park but missed out on the podium in all three races again at Road America.

As he faltered, another driver stepped forth to fill the void: TJ Speed Motorsports rookie Elkin, who took his first two series victories on the speedway’s road course.

“It was a really good month of May,” Elkin says. “It hasn’t really changed my mindset or my confidence or anything. It’s just nice to have these results and victories.”

For all intents and purposes, Elkin was not a clear team leader before the season started, never mind a title contender. A series rookie with only one prior season of racing in the Americas in USF Juniors under his belt, Elkin lined up alongside Sebastian Manson, the 2024 runner-up in FRegional Japan, and Jace Denmark, a 2024 USF Pro 2000 title contender entering his third season in the series.

The season started on the wrong foot. A chassis-damaging crash took Elkin out of both races and left him with only three points leaving the weekend, but he rebounded in spectacular style. He finished in the top five in each of the next seven races, taking his maiden podium at NOLA before scoring his first two wins.

A dominant drive to victory in the Freedom 90, in which he lapped all but six of his rivals, took him to second in the standings a month and a half after he lay 22nd and last. All that was on what was his first oval race, for he had skipped USF2000, the customary middle step between USF Juniors and USF Pro 2000.

“It was the right decision,” Elkin says. “I had quite a rich background from Europe, and it felt like the right thing to do, and I think that I knew it from the start.”

The 18-year-old came into the US having run the 2023 Italian F4 season with Jenzer Motorsport. He finished 17th in points with a best result of seventh at Vallelunga – a decent rookie season but not necessarily one that portended the run of form he later showed stateside.

Some may suggest the difference in his performance is down to a difference in competitive level, but the Israeli driver points to another factor: a more level playing field.

“In the US, the level is actually surprisingly quite high, because in Europe, in most of the championships, it’s a bit of a monopoly of teams, and you can only win by driving for the X, Y, Z team and paying this amount of money,” Elkin says.

“Here in the US, no matter where you look, from USF Juniors to IndyCar, you have a very competitive field, and many different teams are able to compete for good results. That’s what I like about it because the scholarship program is interesting. I’m not considering or taking it as a plan to win anything. If it comes, it comes.”

For the moment, Elkin – who says he views himself as his own biggest rival – has a 73-point gap to close to Garcia as well as a one-point gap to Clark, Garcia’s equal in consistency and the lone driver in the top six with close to a full season’s worth of experience in USF Pro 2000.

Clark’s 2024 season started with promise. It was his third year with DEForce Racing after he won the 2022 USF Juniors title and finished fifth in the USF2000 standings the following year. But the Canadian never stood on the podium and pulled out of the season with one round left after hitting budget problems.

For 2025, the 21-year-old engineering student moved to Exclusive Autosport, joining up with former Andretti Autosport engineer Joe D’Agostino. Five rounds into his second season in USF Pro 2000, Clark has still yet to win a race, but a scorecard of eight podiums from 12 races – three of which came at the last round at Road America – puts him second in points, 72 behind Clark.

“It’s a good weekend whenever you’re not elated finishing on the podium,” he tells Feeder Series at Road America.

After the St Petersburg round, Clark told Feeder Series that his long-run pace ‘definitely needs a little bit of work’. But as the season wore on, the statistics painted a different picture. Clark never qualified in the top five in the first three rounds, but he finished all but two races in those positions. At both IRP and Road America, top-five starting positions – including pole position at the former, the season’s lone oval race – preceded podium finishes.

That consistency comes in part from his experience – and careful approach. The Canadian tells Feeder Series at the start of the year that while he is funded for a full season, ‘money’s a challenge, and when we get to the end of the year, it’s going to be tight’. Even with more security by the season’s second half, he knows he has to be vigilant.

Clark’s situation is not dissimilar to Denmark’s from 2024. The Arizona native had come off a quiet rookie season and blossomed as a sophomore, demonstrating stellar consistency that kept him in the fight until the final race even without a victory.

At that point, moving on to Indy NXT made the most sense for Denmark, but things changed over the winter, and he ended up back on the USF Pro 2000 grid with TJ Speed.

“The move to TJ Speed wasn’t expected,” Denmark says. “I was trying to put something together for Indy NXT last year. [I] had a couple of really good tests at Indy with the Andretti Cape guys, where we were top five in the morning, and I had an investor in for a half a million dollars, but they had backed out and I was unable to put anything together for Indy NXT.

“It opened up a new avenue where HMD and TJ Speed, [respective team principals] Mike Maurini and Tim Neff, came to me with this opportunity and it just made the most sense at the time.”

Denmark secured his ride with TJ Speed at the end of January. His pedigree made him a clear favourite for the title, but it was not to be.

At St Petersburg, Denmark – who said he was racing without insurance and had been ‘self-sufficient’ since the middle of last year – remained confident about finishing the season. His form that weekend and in subsequent rounds, however, quashed his hopes of winning the title and vaulting to Indy NXT, with fourth in race two at Indianapolis Motor Speedway his only top-five finish.

Days before Road America, Denmark announced he had suspended his USF Pro 2000 campaign. From the heights of what should have been a second title-contending season, Denmark now lingered around the awning of Pabst Racing, for whom he raced from 2021 to 2024, supporting Garcia and Douglas as they roared to podium finishes at Road America.

Douglas himself has experience of sitting on the sidelines. Despite winning the 2023 YACademy Winter Series title and having a strong USF2000 later that year, the New Zealander competed only in two GB3 rounds for Chris Dittmann Racing later in 2024, taking a best result of 17th. 

As he explains, his time testing and racing GB3’s Tatuus MSV-022, even if limited, proved beneficial when he returned stateside.

“The GB3 car was really good for helping me get up to speed quickly in this,” he says. “We looked at the best thing we could do, cost-effective, and a car that would help me stay sharp, and that worked really well. I got into the USF Pro car and I felt like I hit the ground running a bit rather than having a complete year out.”

Still, the 20-year-old faced an adjustment on his return to a full-time seat.

“It was tough,” Douglas recalls. “Probably more on the race craft and all that side of things after having a year out, but the Pabst guys did a great job helping me get back up to speed. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, really. Re-learned some stuff from previous years, but definitely, it’s been a big learning curve. We’ve been making progress every weekend, so I’m super excited to keep on going.”

Douglas was the victim of an accident in the season opener at St Petersburg before rebounding with a podium in race two and three fourth places at NOLA. He has been less consistent since then, but two podiums at Road America and his maiden series win at Indianapolis have put him sixth in the points – albeit 117 points off Garcia.

For the likes of Douglas and Max Taylor, who sits just one point ahead in fifth, the title is mostly out of reach now. 

“We came into the year wanting to win the championship,” Douglas says. “Some things haven’t quite gone our way. We had a bit of bad luck, made some mistakes on my end, so at the moment, I’m just focused on round by round, race by race and trying to go out and get wins, get podiums and just not worry too far, too much about the future.”

VRD Racing’s Taylor finally took his first USF Pro 2000 victory in race three at Road America after slow starts in the previous two races – the first induced by mechanical trouble, the second driver error – dropped him outside the top three. Even still, with just two prior podiums, Taylor has little chance of another title after he won USF Juniors and finished third in USF2000 last year.

“It’s definitely tough,” he says. “I talk to Dan [Mitchell, team owner] about this a lot where you win a championship and then you go on and expect to be P1 every session and you have an expectation to win the next championship, so it’s definitely difficult to accept the reality that sometimes it doesn’t go right and the best you could do is focus on yourself and learn from it.

“I think I had a real moment in the middle of the season there in May where things weren’t going our way and it wasn’t looking great, but I turned it around. I was trying to focus on things that I can learn from it and taking away the positives from it.”

The victory at Road America crowned Taylor’s comeback from four consecutive finishes outside the top seven, which dropped him far off runaway leader Garcia. His biggest achievement in 2025, though, is not reflected in his USF Pro 2000 results.

Taylor has gracefully switched between USF Pro 2000’s Tatuus IP-22 and the faster Dallara IL-15 in Indy NXT as part of his part-time campaign with series juggernaut HMD Motorsports. He even qualified third in his second-ever round at the Detroit street circuit just a week after racing in the Freedom 90 at the Indianapolis Raceway Park oval.

The difference in pace between the cars is notable, especially considering Taylor’s background. At the 6.515-kilometre Road America, the fastest Indy NXT race lap, Caio Collet’s 1:53.6931, was more than eight seconds faster than the 2:01.8536 set by Garcia in race three, almost 16 seconds faster than Jack Jeffers’ USF2000-best 2:09.4049 and almost 21 seconds faster than Taylor’s own 2:14.5710 from USF Juniors last year.

“It’s been a bit less of a challenge than I thought,” he admits. “Both teams, VRD and HMD, are giving me really good equipment, so I’m able to go back and forth quite smoothly. I think I’m learning so much in both categories and I’m able to apply it in each of them as well, so it’s been beneficial for sure but definitely not easy.”

---

With six races left, there is a sense of inevitability to USF Pro 2000’s title race, which has mathematically winnowed to 10 drivers and, realistically, to somewhere between four and six. No matter what happens at Mid-Ohio, Garcia will remain in the lead come the end of the weekend. He would become USF Pro 2000’s youngest-ever champion if he won the title, just as he did in USF2000 in 2024.

“I fell inside a trap last year and lost a touch, but this year we’re not going to do that,” Garcia says, with characteristic determination. “Our goal is just to win the last six races.”

Whether he wants to do so or not, Garcia can afford to play it safe. All others harbouring ambitions of a championship title must share his goal of winning everything they can. Those hoping to defeat him have to score, at minimum, an average of 12 points more than he does per race.

Unsurprisingly, most others are, by this point, focused on the smaller prizes rather than the big one. For Clark, who stands the best mathematical chance of overhauling Garcia, matching the Pabst driver’s consistency will be essential.

“When you have a deficit that is that big and the guys behind are still close, you don’t really want to think about it,” Clark says. “Of course, you want to be smart, finish every race, and try to keep the podium streak alive, right? And that’s going to translate well for us.”

There’s more than just pride and a championship trophy on the line. The champion also receives a scholarship valued at $594,500 to advance to Indy NXT, just one step below IndyCar. For the likes of Clark, De Tullio and Douglas, each of whom have had to put seasons on hold for budgetary reasons, the award would offer a lifeline as they eye the rising costs of the ladder.

The title is a key predictor of future success. All of the series’ champions from 2018 to 2022 currently race in IndyCar, while the two most recent champions are in the top four in Indy NXT. The trajectory for the champion-in-waiting is clear – and there has never been a better time for all who want the crown to deliver.

Header photo credit: Gavin Baker