Nikita Johnson has followed a winding path in his motorsport career, but he has finally settled on a direction. The 18-year-old has been one of the standout drivers of the 2026 Indy NXT season, winning two of the first three races and never finishing outside the top seven in the other 10. Feeder Series caught up with the Cape Motorsports Powered by ECR driver at the Road America round last month to discuss his time in Europe and his return to the IndyCar ladder.

By Vincent van der Hoek and Michael McClure

Nikita Johnson has never done things just one way.

In 2022, having barely turned 14, Johnson was both challenging for the USF Juniors title and making entries in USF2000, the next level on the ladder to IndyCar. He ran a full campaign in 2023 in USF2000 but also contested the final five USF Pro 2000 races, executing an almost unfathomable six-race weekend at Portland to round out the campaigns. In 2024, the Floridian finished second in USF Pro 2000 while jetting back and forth from Europe, where he had launched a GB3 campaign with VRD by Arden after turning 16 on 25 May.

By 2025, he took his globetrotting even further. Johnson started the year in New Zealand’s compact, five-round Formula Regional Oceania Championship, and as soon as the season ended in early February, he was back in the United States to prepare for his Indy NXT debut in March in St Petersburg with HMD Motorsports. He went on to compete in the doubleheader at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May, but not before beginning a simultaneous second GB3 campaign, this time with Hitech. And at the end of June, an opportunity in F3 – directly on the F1 ladder – opened up when he took the spot of the suspended Nicola Lacorte at DAMS for the Spielberg round.

In half a year, Johnson had driven four cars of entirely different specifications all over the world. This variety gave him invaluable experience in different cars, but it made delivering consistent performances difficult. The championship challenges he had once executed on the USF ladder – Johnson placed third in USF Juniors, second in USF2000 and second in USF Pro 2000 in successive years from 2022 to 2024 – became impossible to sustain.

It meant that after finishing third in FR Oceania, 65 points behind current F1 rookie Arvid Lindblad, with a victory and five further podiums, Johnson went winless for the remainder of 2025. While his three Indy NXT races were unlikely to yield success, he failed to add to his two prior GB3 victories with the series’ new car and finished no higher than 13th in the eight F3 races he ultimately contested after moving up mid-season with Hitech.

The results reflected the difficulty of a mid-season adjustment and arguably belied his promise as a driver. So as the F3 season came to an end in early September, there was a growing realisation that he needed to commit to either Europe or North America, not balance both.

That decision ultimately led him back home. Not even three weeks after the F3 season ended, Cape Motorsports announced that Johnson would compete full-time with the newly independent team in Indy NXT in 2026.

“I had like two or three [options] in FIA F3 and two or three to go to GB3 or FRECA, so I could have easily stayed in Europe,” Johnson tells Feeder Series on a warm Friday at Road America. “But at that point, I knew that I’d have to go most likely waste two years of my life, racing in FIA F3, just before I could go to F2.

“At that point, I was still young, and I wanted to come back to the States and try to get to be a paid driver as soon as I could. And I knew the journey to F1, I wouldn’t be able to maybe be a paid driver for a long time even if I made it. So that was probably one of the biggest reasons to come back to the States – to try to do 2026 [in Indy NXT] and either 2027 or 2028 be in IndyCar and make a career out of racing.”

The choice to return to Indy NXT for a full season immediately paid dividends. Johnson, still not yet 18, started the season off with a win in the opening race in St Petersburg, Florida, with a contingent of friends and family in attendance. It was his first single-seater victory in more than a year and his third on the 14-turn street circuit located on the opposite side of the Pinellas Peninsula to his home in Gulfport.

“It was pretty amazing to go get it, our first weekend together, so I can’t really thank the Cape boys enough and ECR for everything that they did,” he says. “I kind of expected [to win], but I didn’t know we’d get it so soon.”

Johnson is new to Cape, but part of the success comes from the familiar feeling he gets from the team and how they operate. It’s a sentiment that goes deeper than the team’s nearly 20 years of being based in St Petersburg before their move to Brownsburg, Indiana, in 2020. Cape were competing in USF2000 at the time, winning the series in their final year – Johnson’s first – in 2022.

When Johnson made his competitive single-seater racing debut in 2020 in the YACademy Winter Series, Velocity Racing Development, an emerging rival of Cape’s, were the team who fielded him. He competed almost exclusively with VRD through the end of 2024, going up the USF Pro Championships ladder with him and eventually joining their nascent GB3 squad. Throughout, he was almost always their highest scorer and sometimes even their only driver. 

When he moved teams in 2025, though, the amount and type of attention shifted. His FR Oceania team, M2 Competition, fielded six full-time entries that year; his Indy NXT team, HMD Motorsports, ran as many as nine. He had only two other teammates at Hitech in GB3 and F3, but Hitech had separate full-time squads in four other series. Cape, conversely, have never left the United States, and their only programme since their 2022 USF2000 title has been in Indy NXT.

“I was always used to being in a small team, and then once I got to a bigger team, it was just a different atmosphere. I knew coming into this year I didn’t want to go with any of the really big teams,” Johnson explains. 

“We knew what the Capes did in the USF2000 because I raced against them. We just wanted to come back to a small team where it was a little bit simpler, [more like] family, and that’s what we did. And I’m super happy with the decision we made. I wouldn’t change it at all to go to a big team.”

On the 24-car Indy NXT grid, Cape Motorsports, fielding Johnson and the returning Matteo Nannini, are one of just two two-car squads with no affiliations to fellow teams. From 2024 to 2025, however, they had a technical alliance with Indy NXT heavyweights Andretti, running their cars under the Andretti Cape Indy NXT moniker and sharing staff and structural oversight. Dominic and Nicholas Cape’s team now have a technical partnership with IndyCar team Ed Carpenter Racing, who also support the Jay Howard Driver Development outfit further down the IndyCar ladder. 

“There’s been a few changes, of course, but I’m just really happy to be able to help develop the car, and the Cape brothers and Reggie [Cape, their father] have been doing an amazing job with setting up the car,” Johnson says.

“We’re always developing the car really well. Sometimes the bigger teams get to the setup a little bit faster than us because they have more cars, but other than that, we’re always pretty much right there.”

With six podiums this season, including wins at St Petersburg and the third race at Barber, Johnson has been able to fight with drivers from the bigger Indy NXT teams on a regular basis. Buoyed by the consistency in both performance and logistics that he lacked last year, the American sits third in the Indy NXT drivers’ championship with 411 points. That puts him 20 points behind championship leader Enzo Fittipaldi and three points behind second-placed Tymek Kucharczyk, both of HMD. Five races remain in the 17-race season, and everything is still to play for in Indy NXT’s most hotly contested title fight since 2017, one Johnson has led for much of the year.

The stakes are as high as they could be with one of IndyCar’s wildest silly seasons of late actively unfolding. McLaren were the catalysts by announcing their new-look line-up last week, with six-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon coming over from Chip Ganassi Racing after 25 years and Indianapolis 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist moving across from Meyer Shank Racing to join existing McLaren driver Pato O’Ward. The downstream effects of these moves could give opportunities to Indy NXT talent to fill the newly vacant spots. 

“For all the drivers on the grid, we’re one step away from IndyCar, so everybody’s talking to all the IndyCar teams, or as many as they can, before the season even starts. Everybody’s meeting everybody at St Pete, and then it slows down,” Johnson explains.

“Whoever wins the last weekend is always going to get a phone call from someone. So right now I’m just trying to get a few more wins underneath my belt, and I’m concerned with winning the championship. Whatever happens, happens, but the only thing that I can control is winning races and winning the championship. If I do that, most of the teams are going to want me.”

While anyone in Johnson’s position will naturally look upwards, another set of racing connections makes the recent 2027 driver market developments all the more relevant for him. True to his nature, Johnson remains active in multiple types of cars, this year competing in the IMSA SportsCar Championship’s GTD Pro category with RLL Team McLaren alongside F2 alumnus Max Esterson, with Dean McDonald and Jüri Vips joining for endurance events. In Detroit, he even raced both in the same weekend – because Nikita Johnson has never done things just one way.

In addition to gaining experience in sports cars and assisting with development and testing, Johnson has ties to both McLaren’s and Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s IndyCar teams through the drive.

“It’s just good experience, and sports cars is a really good career for anyone. Obviously Hypercar you make a good bit out of it and they go to amazing tracks around the world in IMSA and WEC,” Johnson says. 

“I’m for sure keeping that on my radar, but right now the goal is IndyCar. We had this really good deal with RLL that’s also in IndyCar, but we just had a really good deal with them to go run the McLaren and go help develop it. It was good to dip my toes in the water and just gain experience for maybe 10 years [from now].”

Given his recent form and career goals, a future in IndyCar seems almost an expectation. So does Johnson ever regret his European diversion – or wonder how it might have panned out differently with other circumstances? 

“The time there was a little bit weird,” he admits. “GB3 is an excellent championship, but at that point, it was a brand-new car, so we had a [few] mechanical failures.

“One of the drivers got dropped from Hitech FIA F3, and so at that point it was kind of a no-brainer to go from a car that was really fast but sometimes would break down to FIA F3 and following the main show, right? So we did that.

“It was really good to learn, but it was extremely hard competing against drivers that are second- or third-year drivers in it that also have done all the pre-season and post-season testing, when I just get thrown into the car that weekend at Red Bull Ring. Even though it was a bit hard, I took a lot out of it and learned a lot. I still had an okay qualifying at Monza – it was like P15, [but] it should have been top eight or top ten.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should have done another year over there, and then at the end of the day, I’m really happy that I came back to the States. Really, IndyCar is starting to take off, the same as Indy NXT. We have a lot of talent here and it’s going upwards.”

In those rare moments between events when he’s not racing something, Johnson finds a distinct way to decompress: fishing. He frequently posts on Instagram about going fishing with friends and family and some of the big catches he’s made in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

“A lot of drivers do a lot of different things. They do golf or running or cycling. I like to do fishing, and I’m starting to get into golf. It’s just a great way to go disconnect and hang out with my buddies and my family,” he says.

“Even when you’re fishing, even though it’s a low-stress environment, you’re still mentally turned on. You’re trying to figure out what spots to go to. You’re navigating the boat, right? And you’re always thinking of different things – what the fish is going to eat, where you need to go, what water to have, what spots. Even though it’s switched off and you get to relax, you’re still using your head the whole time you’re out there fishing.”

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Johnson returns to action this weekend at Nashville, the only superspeedway on the Indy NXT calendar, where he will hope to reel in Kucharczyk and Fittipaldi and reassert himself atop the championship table.

Additional reporting by Ethan Engelson

Header photo credit: Joe Skibinski / Penske Entertainment