Just over a year ago, an enigmatic racing team called ENVE Motorsports made their USF2000 debut at the Portland season finale. Led by billionaire businessman Mark Hancock and Indy NXT driver Matteo Nannini, the Thermal Club–based outfit with roots in cycling has big ambitions on the IndyCar ladder. Feeder Series sat down with members of the team earlier this summer to learn more.

By Vincent van der Hoek and Michael McClure

On the surface, a 51-year-old Utah-based billionaire entrepreneur and a 23-year-old Italian racing driver have little in common.

But sometimes, those unorthodox duos click, driven by a passion for speed and an uncommonly lofty ambition: to become the Red Bull of the IndyCar ladder while climbing to the top themselves.

Mark Hancock and Matteo Nannini are the co-owners of ENVE Motorsports, the youngest racing team on the USF2000 grid. Having made their debut just over a year ago, ENVE are now running a full-season campaign with USF2000 driver Wesley Gundler, while their branding also adorns Nannini’s Cape Motorsports Powered by ECR racecar in Indy NXT two rungs up the ladder.

While still a teenager, Nannini raced in Europe, the Middle East and North America, winning races on each continent. So what drove him to pivot – or expand – his focus from driving to team ownership at such a young age? 

“I had a few good connections off track, and we just wanted to be able to create something different – something more like there can be a path for younger drivers where it’s not only related to money. Because money, nowadays, is the limiting factor for 99 per cent of the best drivers,” Nannini told Feeder Series.

“I haven’t really done anything like this before, but I have the experience of what it takes to make a car go fast, and I enjoy coaching other drivers to get some experience with that. So it was just a point of also making something that can become a living for us, long term, rather than just giving money to other teams – because at the end of the day, that’s what it is so far.”

I. The entity

ENVE Composites, the main business of ENVE, was founded in 2007 as Edge Composites. The company manufactures bicycle parts for both enthusiasts and professional cycling teams, with the UAE Team Emirates outfit – home to current cycling superstar and five-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar – among their clients.

Utah resident Hancock’s family holdings company, PV3 Investments, purchased ENVE at the end of April 2024. The terms of the transaction were kept private. The ambition, however, would gradually become clear: to grow from a cycling brand to an extreme sports empire. That plan began with operating a fleet of racing-spec cars, both open-wheelers and sports cars.

Initial filings by Nannini for a corporate entity called Apex6 LLC – located in Thermal, California – were made with the Office of the Secretary of State in California in late September 2024. An update to the type of business from e-commerce to ‘motorsports’ was made eight months later. Nannini and his father, Edgardo ‘Eddie’ Nannini, are now among the five directors of Apex6, the other three being Hancock and his sons Spencer Hancock and Andrew Hancock. ENVE and Apex6 are housed at the location and understood to be one and the same.

As a racing team, ENVE made their single-seater debut last year at Portland International Raceway with Spencer Hancock behind the wheel. But a debut that soon wasn’t always the plan, as Nannini explained.

“We weren’t even planning to do Portland,” Nannini said. “We were planning to do it this year, but we had a driver and he wanted to just give it a try, so we just rushed it back together, bought some cars.”

The luxury of a hasty debut comes with the advantage of ample resources, to be sure. But the team is also aided by their location at the Thermal Club, a members-only race track in southern California’s sun-soaked Coachella Valley with a recent expansion into mainstream motorsport. IndyCar organised a non-championship million-dollar challenge at the desert venue in 2024 before holding a points-paying championship race in 2025. Both events were won by Chip Ganassi Racing’s Álex Palou.

Being based adjacent to a private track in such a warm climate means the team can test and network relatively freely year-round. 

“The goal with ENVE,” Nannini said, “is to be able to create a platform where we have the support from ENVE and from other big companies that [would] give us more leverage to select better drivers and those who have a smaller budget – to give them the opportunity to be in a car.”

“The good thing about being in Thermal is that we have a lot of connections and access to wealthy people and they all like racing, which is great,” he added. “And that’s why long term, I want to be able to be the team where, yes, we need budgets from drivers, but that’s not the priority. If you’re good, okay, then us as a team, together, we’ll find the budget, so you just focus on winning for us.”

Winning only comes when the right ingredients, including people, are in place. So Nannini and Hancock got to work, bringing in the likes of seven-time USF2000 championship-winning engineer Don Conner to help spearhead the charge for the team. Conner, who also engineered Kyle Kirkwood’s F4 US title while at Cape Motorsports, is the namesake and owner of the DC Autosport team that last ran in the series in 2024. He then became a partner in Kevin Houk’s Benchmark Autosport outfit – effectively replacing DC’s USF2000 entry – which ran until Mid-Ohio last year, shortly before ENVE’s first race.

“We tried to get the best in everything, from the best truck, the best canopy, the best equipment and the best people we could find,” Nannini explains. “At some point in racing, it’s also about stealing people from other teams. So that’s what I tried to do with Don, for example, and some other guys. You bring the experience to cut this lack of experience on our side.”

That’s also where Nannini’s father comes in. Eddie Nannini is an engineer with significant experience in motorsport and the automotive industry, having worked for Minardi, Coloni, Subaru and most recently Bugatti in development of the EB 110 road car. The elder Nannini, as his son says, also works to limit team mistakes in a racing environment ‘full of sharks’.

“We do a bit of everything. From running the shop at Thermal, we also have another 15 GT cars that we take care of to do this, hiring the right people, firing the wrong people. At the end of the day, I think that between me and him, we’re probably the ones who put the most passion into this,” the 23-year-old says. “And we get a bit upset when things don’t go right, which some people might say it’s not the right way to do it. But, you know, when we are trying to do something different, you want to make sure you set it right.”

II. The newcomer

The team currently run a single-car operation in USF2000, with Wesley Gundler behind the wheel of the #46. The 17-year-old from North Carolina is in his first year in USF2000 after finishing third in the Formula Race Promotions F1600 Championship Series, only two points behind eventual champion and future USF2000 rival Ayrton Cahan. 

For Gundler, the deal to race with ENVE came together after conversations that followed the annual USF Pro Fall Combine in October, in which the team ran cars for Nannini and Chace Supplee.

“They actually reached out to me a little bit before the fall combine. At that point, I was testing with Pabst. And then after that, we reached back out and said that we’d like to have a chat. But then we went out and tested with them at Thermal Club and it went really well – figured that there was a great mutual connection and we decided we’d run the season with them,” Gundler told Feeder Series.

“I went to Thermal I think three times during the off-season. It’s quite the journey over there. It’s all the way across the country, but it’s still a great place to go to. It’s a beautiful facility, and being literally in the backyard of the team shop, it makes it easy to test.”

Gundler has run solidly in the midfield this season, with his results trending upwards of late. Having been classified between eighth and 15th in all but one of the first 11 races, Gundler finally broke through in Portland, where he scored his best result of the season so far by finishing fifth in race one. He finished eighth in race two, while in the most recent round on the streets of Markham, he survived two highly chaotic races to come home with a sixth place and an 11th place.

These results currently put Gundler ninth in the championship with 168 points, making him the third-highest-placed rookie this season behind Oliver Wheldon in fifth and João Vergara in sixth. Moreover, he has done so as one of just two drivers without a teammate, the other being PFH Racing returnee Wian Boshoff, currently 12th.

“The season has been super positive so far. First-time driver, my first time in the series and the team’s first full season, so I think we’re doing really well and we’re making progress,” Gundler said. 

“I get a lot of focus and I have a backup car, but then there’s no data comparison to test all the setups. It’s only on me. I don’t have a teammate who can also run at the same time. That makes it a bit more difficult compared to these teams that have four or five cars.”

What Gundler has, however, is regular access to an active Indy NXT driver as his team boss and effective driver coach. 

“He is creating a path for me, he’s the one carving it,” he said about Nannini. “But he also gives me tons of good input, and that can be teams driving all of it. He lets me know what he’s working on, what I can work on. And him being out there, it gives him a perspective of what’s going on, and it helps him give me better input.”

III. The veteran

This time last year, Matteo Nannini thought he wouldn’t be racing again.

His last time behind the wheel competitively had been more than two years prior at Mid-Ohio in July 2023, just eight days before his 20th birthday. He had run seven races that season, even notching a win at Indianapolis on his third-ever outing in the car, before abruptly parting ways with Juncos Hollinger Racing, who stated that there had been ‘a team decision to terminate the contract effective immediately’. A budget shortfall was understood to be the cause.

Before his first, abortive campaign in Indy NXT, Nannini rose rapidly through the racing ladder overseas. He won the 2019 Formula 4 UAE Championship, his first single-seater series, then quickly stepped up to the new FRegional European Championship for a partial season. 

For 2020, the Italian joined Jenzer Motorsport in F3, scoring one podium at Barcelona, before moving to HWA Racelab for 2021 and scoring another podium in Barcelona and a victory in Budapest. He had even started out as part of HWA’s F2 squad too but abandoned the plan to do double duty – permitted with F2 and F3’s pandemic-driven calendar split – after one round. HWA left F2 and F3 after that year, their assets taken over by Van Amersfoort Racing. Nannini did not have a race seat in 2022, with a full-time F2 move not an option either.

“My career has been a lot of ups and downs. I [raced in Europe]; I stopped for a few years, came here, NXT with Juncos, which only lasted a couple of races; and I then stopped for another two years, and then again back – which is great, to be back, but I feel like it’s not great from a driving perspective because I spent so many years doing nothing – just aging, basically,” Nannini said.

“Ther are more opportunities here – not just from driving, but to do business or those types of things. I like it a lot more, the American mindset. You’ve got to hustle it. You’ve got to work for it. I like it here. I don’t really want to go back because I feel like IndyCar is more driver rewarding than just car. F1 – obviously I’m not saying they’re bad; all the drivers in F1, they’re good – but what I’m saying is, there’s team As and team Bs. If you race for team B, unless a tornado happens, you’re not going to win.”

Coming back wasn’t initially part of his plans, especially with his shift towards driver consulting and team management. Nannini did, of course, test ENVE’s USF2000 cars in the project’s early stages, but the deal with Cape surprised many when it was announced in late January, a month before the season began.

“I wasn’t even planning on racing myself. We put the deal together very last minute,” he said. “When the opportunity came up for me to be back in a car, the seats were already gone. Cape had one seat available. They were talking with another driver, but we moved quicker, so we were able to secure it first. And then I think the first time on track was Sebring in January.”

Nannini’s 2026 Indy NXT season has been a tale of extremes. He has two victories this season, one at Road America and a second at Nashville Superspeedway, yet has ended up outside the top 10 in nine of 14 total races this season. That run of form means he sits ninth in the championship standings with 307 points, 168 behind teammate Nikita Johnson, who is battling for the championship with HMD Motorsports drivers Enzo Fittipaldi and Tymek Kucharczyk. 

“We had our ups and downs,” he said. “We haven’t gotten the best of luck so far. Even at the oval [in Gateway], I felt like we had a good pace, but then we had an issue with the car at the start of the race. We didn’t even start, basically. So I think it’s just about having a clean run in qualifying because if we suck in qualifying, then the race is pretty much compromised. Or at the oval, if you start seven laps down, it’s pretty tough to make seven laps.”

Nannini’s balancing act between pursuing his own racing career and managing another team is unique. On some weekends, he literally runs from one end of the paddock to the other to get everything done. He joined Feeder Series in the ENVE awning after one such trek following a debrief of his Indy NXT practice session at Road America.

“It’s tough,” he admitted. “I want to try to do both sides as well as I can. I feel like [ENVE] requires a bit more attention to start because we’re still new and the people are getting into the rhythm. Over there, it’s more about making sure I have a good setup I like and maximising when it’s time to do so. I feel like the program on NXT could have been better, but considering we put the deal together very last minute and there were some personnel changes on the team side, I think it’s not too bad – just running back and forth.”

There are some benefits to the deal, such as the fact that lessons Nannini learns on track can apply to Gundler and vice versa. 

“I think it’s helping me more from a mechanical standpoint when it comes down to the changes, because I know what we do here,” Nannini said. “We drove here yesterday, and then I drove today in Road America, and we were having oversteer, and then I was having oversteer, so we can pretty much do the same changes. Obviously, it’s a very different car, right? I think it’s just a bit more helpful on the mechanical engineering side, like me understanding how the car works.”

IV. The endgame

“I think IndyCar is very doable. Obviously, I want to get some better results in NXT because I know I don’t belong in 15th in the championship,” Nannini said just two days before his Road America win. “Maybe do a smaller team at first and then move up into a bigger team if there is a chance. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I want to do well. I don’t like being in the back. So I think IndyCar is the most reasonable thing of today for me rather than chasing the F1 dream.”

Even with having improved six places in the standings since that victory two months ago, Nannini maintains a personal ambition undeniably bold in scale. It’s one he also shares for his race team.

For now, ENVE’s presence in the two Penske Entertainment series comes via branding on the sidepod of Nannini’s Cape car as well as the Rahal Letterman Lanigan #47 IndyCar machine driven by rookie Mick Schumacher. Nannini described it as a way ‘to create some more brand awareness and know who we are’ in case the team makes its way further up the ladder.

It’s a little early for a single-car outfit to think about jumping three rungs. But Nannini and Hancock are already planning to change things for 2027.

“The plan for the team is to run to a bigger operation,” Nannini said. “Not eight cars or seven cars. I think that’s a bit too much. But three cars and then progressively also move up. So adding a Pro car, maybe add the NXT, which might be a little bit trickier because it’s not just buy the car and go do it. You need to be approved by them.”

Expansion requires not only machinery but also personnel – especially, in the case of ENVE, marketing staff.

“We’re a big team just for one car, to be honest. Not just for the people that are here, but for the people that are home, the marketing and all the stuff. I think it’s easy to see just from our setup. It looks way better than everybody else in the USF2000 just because we don’t want to make it to the point where we’re saving 500 bucks for a canopy,” Nannini said.

“We want to try to make it to the point where we’re like a little F1 team. Everything is taken care of, and obviously results have to be up to standard too.”

The ‘little F1 team’ label carries with it high expectations. Nannini romanticises the idea of ‘becoming like Red Bull’, six-time F1 constructors’ champions with a large driver academy, in both range and success in sport participation. Rapid growth is one way for him and ENVE to realise those big ambitions, of course, but so are efficiency and ruthless decision-making. It’s something Nannini said he has had to demonstrate on more than a few occasions.

“It’s not about having the right people. It’s about having those people who care,” he said. “You might be surprised, but I’ve fired like 20 people already, just because they would only come for the money. I understand everybody needs money to survive. I understand that. But other than the money, I also need to have a passion. You need to, if something happens, try to fix it. Get mad. Show some passion towards the sport. Because we’re all here for the same reason – we’re not just coming here to cruise. We’re spending too much money to be here to just drive around.”

Merely driving around is something reserved for ENVE’s road cars. With the race team, Nannini and Hancock eye speed, on and off track.

“[Hancock] knows everything for the next move, what to do to go faster, what do we need, because the idea is I don’t want to take like five years to get to be in front,” Nannini continued.

“I want to be able to get in front as quickly as we can. So we need to be able to select where we put our money in to be able to do some smart moves, which I think so far is working great. I mean, with wealth, we keep progressing and getting closer and closer.”

Header photo credit: Zyair Buckner