Caitlyn McDaniel will return to the GB4 Championship in 2026 for her second full season in racing. Speaking to Feeder Series, the 18-year-old American opened up about her battle with mental health and how it has influenced her perspective on racing, on and off track.

By George Sanderson

Prior to her 2025 GB4 campaign, Caitlyn McDaniel had never completed a full season of racing at any level: single-seaters, closed-cockpit cars or karts.

In early December 2024, the American took part in her first test day in a GB4 car with Fox Motorsport at Snetterton – with just six months of competitive experience in rental karts to boast.

Fast forward to April 2025. McDaniel was announced as a driver for Fox Motorsport, making her GB4 debut at Donington Park at the start of the month. In a field of 25 drivers, her relative inexperience was evident. McDaniel qualified 24th, only ahead of a disqualified Alex O’Grady, and finished 4.4 seconds off the pace of polesitter and eventual championship runner-up Isaac Phelps.

However, as the Donington weekend progressed, McDaniel continuously improved. She gained positions in all three races, securing two top-20 finishes and improving on her qualifying lap by 1.491 seconds in race two – the biggest improvement of any driver.

It was an upward trend that continued for the majority of the 2025 season. McDaniel secured 11 more top-20 finishes from the other 18 races, including a best finish of 14th, on her way to a 25th-place finish in the drivers’ championship – ahead of one other full-time competitor and five part-time entrants. She was one of just four full-time entrants who finished every race.

Now, looking to 2026, the 18-year-old believes there is even more to come.

“It’s definitely still a big learning process,” McDaniel told Feeder Series last month. “I think we’ve made a lot of improvements from last year. We haven’t had too much good running, just due to a few car issues [and] a few track issues, but overall, it’s been quite an improvement, especially Donington.”

McDaniel was 18th on the first day of testing at the Midlands circuit, 1.765s off of the pace-setting time of her new teammate, Luke Hilton. In a field of 27 cars, McDaniel had been able to demonstrate that, when things go to plan, she has the pace to compete with the pack.

“From being towards the back to being towards the midfield – or being in the midfield with a bigger grid of cars – has been such an improvement,” she said. “It’s shown me that the work I have put in, when things do go right on test days, does make a difference.”

McDaniel departed Fox at the end of 2025, signing for Nitrous Competitions ADM Racing – a partnership between David Williams’ British Superbike team, Nitrous Competitions, and Gary Ward’s ADM single-seater squad. The new collaboration has also paved the way for an expansion into GB3, with ADM’s 2025 GB4 driver Jason Pribyl confirmed to be making the step up and Daniel Guinchard, who finished third in GB4 last year, spotted testing the car at Silverstone.

Going through her first team change was ‘always going to be difficult’, McDaniel said, but she was happy with the transition so far.

“The team is incredible and I’ve loved working with them,” she said. “We’ve been able to find the proper coaching and ways to go about testing, and about learning, that has really worked well for me and has made me improve.”

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The American is still inexperienced in a racing sense, with 2026 being her second full campaign at single-seater level. Unlike a lot of the drivers on the GB4 grid who grew up with racing, either through family connections or by getting into the sport at a young age, McDaniel only began karting in 2024. She was 16 years old when she first took to the track and had turned 17 before her first open rental race.

“My dad and I were talking and were like, ‘What’s something fun that we can do?’ and [we] were like, ‘Let’s go karting!’” she told Feeder Series. “We went to a rental kart track, and I started going once every week. I didn’t do my first rental championship until early summertime.”

It was a fun activity that eventually paved the way for the early stages of her motorsport career. But as McDaniel explains, she ‘wasn’t planning on being a racing driver’ when she took that first step into karting.

“I purely started racing in 2024 because my mental health got quite bad,” she said. “At the time, I had no plan with my life. I didn’t have the best school life either. When you move 4,000 miles away as a young teenager from the only place you’ve ever lived, it’s quite hard to assimilate into whatever environment you’re put into. I was just struggling so much mentally.”

McDaniel moved to the United Kingdom from Northern Virginia in spring 2021 after her mother got a job as a diplomat at the United States embassy in London. Whilst the move itself was tough, through karting, she found ‘something else to look forward to in life’.

McDaniel was diagnosed with major depressive disorder in 2019, and having an activity to which she could dedicate a lot of her time was proving to be a significant help.

“The main part of my life is my mental health and prioritising myself,” she told Feeder Series. “Racing is not the way I cope with it, but it’s something that I enjoy doing.… I race for me; I don’t race for anybody else. I don’t race for my parents. I don’t race for any expectations. I race purely for me because it’s something that I enjoy and it makes me happy.”

Still, competing in a ‘very high pressure’ sport comes with a lot of expectations surrounding her performance.

“Everyone around me was telling me, ‘You have to push; you have to push,’” McDaniel recalled. “For me, it’s not that simple to just get up and work harder. For me, I have to take the time every single day to just get up, let alone get up and work harder than someone else.”

The pressure to perform to the best of your ability is a common part of motorsport, which is a demanding industry even at the lowest levels. Though racing was in some ways a distraction, McDaniel admitted that there were times last season when it became more of a hindrance than a help.

“I really struggled with it last year,” she said. “The only thing that consumed me was that I have to do well with racing, and at the end of the season I started to not enjoy it anymore.”

“I started doing this purely because I enjoy doing it,” she continued. “I’m also a very competitive person so when I don’t do well in it, I’m going to be angry.”

With everything else on her plate at the time, she was struggling.

“I didn’t really know how to balance it,” she told Feeder Series. “I was moving [house] a lot as well, so my life outside of racing was also quite turbulent. I didn’t really cope with it. I just let it stir and eventually, towards the end of the season, I had a really hard time.”

Like many up-and-coming racing drivers from outside the UK, McDaniel has been in the country on a tourist visa rather than an international sportsperson visa. This status makes it very difficult for McDaniel to access mental health care in the UK. 

State-funded mental health care services such as those offered by the UK’s National Health Service are not generally accessible outside of national borders. In addition, many private providers are unable to administer care to patients living in regions in which they are not licensed to practice. Finding suitable counselor-patient matches in such cases, even disregarding cost, can be difficult if not impossible.

“Over the winter, I went through a really bad period,” she recalls. “I was alone in my flat, kind of doing nothing, so for me it was impossible to get the mental health care that I needed at that time.”

There was a moment last season when she ‘was genuinely considering not racing again’. It was then that she realised she had to change her approach towards motorsport if she was to continue into 2026.

“I just want to do the best I can and enjoy it because, at the end of the day, that’s what I race for,” she said. “I’m trying to spend a lot more time with people outside of racing and to just enjoy the opportunity I have to race as opposed to putting so much pressure on myself to do well at racing.”

McDaniel regularly posts about her mental health on social media in hopes that her experiences may help others.

“Being able to share that with other people – whether they’re in sports or out of sports, or in school or out of school – I think it’s something that so many people can relate to in so many avenues of life,” she explained. “Seeing someone be an athlete and show that, even though life is hard, you can still show up and you can still enjoy life is such an important thing to share.”

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The 2026 GB4 season will get underway for McDaniel in two weeks’ time at Silverstone. The final official pre-season test took place at Brands Hatch last week, but her Nitrous ADM team were not present, meaning the last time the American was in the car was at Oulton Park the week prior.

When Feeder Series spoke with McDaniel shortly after the series test at Silverstone on 24 and 25 March, she admitted to feeling on the back foot.

“To put it bluntly, testing was not great. I don’t think it was great for anyone,” she said. “We had a small brake issue the first day, which took me out of two of the test sessions. I didn’t do as much running, and when I did do running, I was working with an issue with the car.”

After overcoming the mechanical issues on day one, she and the other drivers experienced incredibly unpredictable weather conditions on day two – with sun, rain and sleet present, sometimes all within the same session. 

“It was red flags, track issues, changing the tyres two laps into the session, so we just didn’t get a lot of running,” she said. “Going into [the first round], I would have liked to be a little bit more prepared.”

Things are changing outside of racing for McDaniel too. After the opening round of the season at Silverstone, McDaniel will return to the US. She will continue to travel to the UK for racing before she plans to begin university at the start of 2027.

“I either want to do sports psychology, humanities, forensic science or political science,” she said. “In the US, you can do a major and a minor, so I’m able to study two different subjects.”

With so many changes afoot, McDaniel recognises that her long-term future may lie away from single-seaters. Though she has expressed interest in winter sports bobsleigh and skeleton, she is adamant that she also wants to continue racing for the foreseeable future.

“I’m an athlete. I’ve been competing in sports since I was four years old,” she said. “I just love to be competitive and to compete.”

Growing up, McDaniel wanted to be a professional footballer. She had competed at the regional level until a heart condition forced her to stop playing. When she resumed competitive sports a year later, she continued cheerleading and track and picked up gymnastics and volleyball. Now that she is pursuing her passion for racing, the American has her eyes set on a new category for the future.

“I want to try stock car racing. I think that would be my next journey in racing. It’s something that I’ve loved for quite a long time and something that I want to pursue,” she said. 

“F1 Academy is there, [but] pre-season testing hasn’t put me in the exact place to get the £50,000 scholarship right now,” she added. “If I win the prize, I’m more than happy to do it, but it’s not my be-all-end-all goal in life, and especially in racing.”

Should McDaniel feature on the 2027 F1 Academy grid, she would be the first Black woman to compete in the championship. Such a scenario, in racing at least, is one McDaniel has experienced many times before.

“Back in 2024, when I was getting into racing and I was going to all of these [FIA] Girls on Track events and all these women in racing events,” McDaniel said, “the first thing anyone would mention to me would be my race. It wouldn’t matter what the conversation was supposed to be. They would always trail back to, ‘You should use that to your advantage’, or they would always point out my race.

“My mum and I don’t need anyone else to tell us we’re the only people of colour in this room, especially the only Black people of colour in this room. We are fully aware of that fact.”

When McDaniel discusses mental health, she finds purpose in relating to others in her shoes. But as one of few Black junior single-seater drivers actively competing and the only Black woman among them racing in Europe, her experience is unique.

“I was racing with maybe two other women of colour on a 35-person karting grid. I used to race in a full female championship and there was probably one other woman of colour,” she said. “That is just a very isolating feeling to feel that I can’t relate to people and relate to other people’s struggles.

“People will always ask me how I feel about being a woman in racing, and I’m like, I don’t feel any different from a man being a woman in racing.… In all honesty, I don’t feel weird about being a woman. I feel different because I’m a woman of colour.”

McDaniel believes that as more and more women pick up racing around the world, grids will naturally increase in diversity and feature more women of colour like her.

“There’s not one full-time woman of colour on the F1 Academy grid this year, which I think is quite unfortunate,” she said. “I know there are not many of us to begin with, but I know there are a few who are in the Discover Your Drive programme. So I think as women in racing become more popular, it’s going to get more popular amongst people of colour in general, but especially women of colour.”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography