Josh Pierson has become the latest Indy NXT driver to earn an IndyCar seat, having signed with AJ Foyt Racing for the 2027 season. Before his big move, Feeder Series sat down with Pierson to discuss his time in Indy NXT, the experience he gained in endurance racing and the deep-rooted family support guiding him to the top.

By Michael McClure

Few drivers can say they’ve competed in open-wheel cars since age 14, raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice before turning 18 and signed to a race seat with an IndyCar team before turning 21.

Josh Pierson had been able to boast the first two accolades since June 2023. Now, he has become the only driver ever to achieve all three. AJ Foyt Racing announced on Tuesday that he would be driving the #4 car for the 2027 IndyCar season, becoming the first rookie announced for next season’s grid. As part of an all-new line-up at the team, Pierson will line up alongside 2026 IndyCar Rookie of the Year winner Dennis Hauger and replace Caio Collet, Pierson’s former Indy NXT teammate.

On paper, the move seems surprising. In a season that featured Indy NXT’s largest and arguably most competitive grid in a decade, the 20-year-old finished only 11th in the standings, propped up by back-to-back podiums at Gateway and Road America in June and his first series victory at the season-ending Laguna Seca doubleheader. Even after that breakthrough result, he has struggled to shake the notion that budget, not talent, had paved his road to IndyCar.

But Pierson insists that numbers alone don’t tell the full story of his readiness for America’s top open-wheel championship.

“It’s tough because I’ve been on every step of the podium now and I’ve had pole positions, so the only thing I haven’t done is win the championship,” he tells Feeder Series mere hours after winning the first race at Laguna Seca.

“Last year, I had really strong, consistent results. My race pace has always been good, so I think it’s just about sticking to me. I think that this was a big one. Showing that I have the perseverance to overcome what happened in Milwaukee to now, I think, is a big, big step up for me, and I think the team see that.”

Indeed, Pierson’s day in the California sun wasn’t meant to be his first win. Six days prior at Milwaukee, he seemed assured of victory from pole before a costly error on lap 54 of 90 sent his car spinning into the inside wall from the lead.

The error culminated in his fourth non-finish of the season and the biggest setback in his four-year-long Indy NXT career, but there was a silver lining. Through qualifying and the first 53 laps of the race, the raw pace he had often lacked in 2025 was now on display. Laguna Seca reinforced that the speed could transfer from one circuit type to another.

“Even though this year has been really rocky, if you go back and look at overall performance, I don’t think it’s that bad. It’s just been tough in terms of championship,” he says. “We’ve had situations where it just didn’t quite work out for us, or wrong place, wrong time. Last year was the opposite where I don’t think the performance was as good but I always happened to be in the right spot and just avoided things. This year I haven’t been so lucky. That’s racing, though, right? Some years are great and other years are not.”

Pierson came into the 2026 Indy NXT season as the second most experienced driver in the series, having started 37 races with HMD Motorsports from 2023 through 2025. While neither his partial first season nor his full second season brought top-five finishes, he stepped up in 2025, finishing a career-best sixth in the standings with two podiums and four further top fives. His lowest finishing position all season was 11th, the highest of anyone in the field.

Returning for a fourth campaign, especially after his more promising 2025, put the American into the conversation for drivers tipped to fight at the front. Joining Andretti Global, a dominant force in the series who had fielded the previous two drivers’ champions, only heightened expectations.

“I was happy at HMD. I had good performances there,” Pierson says. “But I was still struggling a little bit, so I wanted outside opinions. I wanted new people looking at data, new people looking at video, and just a fresh look. I wanted new people on the equation, and hopefully that would be the missing link that I needed, and it’s proved to be.”

At Andretti, Pierson received coaching from F1600 racer Bob Perona, who had also worked with him in his second USF2000 season at Pabst Racing in 2021. When the pair first met, Pierson was on his way to fourth in the championship with five podiums and no finishes lower than 12th. Logically, the next step would entail a move up to the Indy Pro 2000 championship, where he would have been the youngest driver by more than a year.

Instead, following the advice of endurance racer and driver coach Stephen Simpson, the Oregon native went to chase an overall record on the global stage. At 16 years and 117 days he became the youngest driver to start the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and a day later he finished sixth in class and 10th overall in the world’s most famous endurance race.

“Stephen Simpson was the big leader in that decision,” Pierson recalls. “I thought he was crazy in 2020 when he was like, ‘Let’s go do the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I think your driving suits these prototypes.’ I thought he was a total lunatic.

“It wasn’t really until he actually started organising things that I’m like, ‘Wow, okay, he’s really believing in me and thinks this is a good call.’

“And the other thing behind that was that was the year that USF Pro was going to a new chassis, and there’s a lot of unknowns that come with that, right? You’re not quite sure which teams are going to have things sorted, which teams are going to know what to do.”

There were other headlines from the endurance stint too. Mere days after Pierson’s 16th birthday, he and United Autosports teammate Paul di Resta – a former F1 driver – won both races they entered in the 2022 Asian Le Mans Series. The pair and Oliver Jarvis then followed it up with another LMP2 class triumph in the World Endurance Championship’s season opener a month later at Sebring. Pierson finished third in the LMP2 class standings come season’s end, and a second campaign in 2023 yielded fifth place plus another win in the 6 Hours of Portimão. He also finished on the podium at Petit Le Mans in both of his IMSA SportsCar Championship campaigns in 2022 and 2023.

“There was a lot more for me to learn going to endurance and learning from really great pro drivers. Tom Blomqvist, Oliver Jarvis, Alex Lynn – I got to work with some incredible people,” he says. “I can just go down this list of drivers that I got to learn directly from, got to look at data directly to, got to compare myself on equal footing in the same car.

“And what was really great about that is there’s no excuse. If you come in at the end of the session and you’re four tenths off, well, you’re in the exact same car, so there’s nothing that you can say, there’s nothing you can do. It’s just here’s where it was, here’s where it is. Go find it. And that, combined with pit stops, fuel saving and tyre management, that’s all stuff that I’m very familiar with now that is going to be a big help too if I’m eventually in an IndyCar.

“Right now, it’s something in my toolset that’s just unused, so that’s the unfortunate side of it. But to be able to do that and understand that and be in long-format races so early was very, very important. And while it hasn’t translated very well to single-seaters coming back in, I know that in a longer-format race, there’s a lot there that I’ve gotten very proficient with that will be handy for me.”

Pierson is now set to achieve his IndyCar dream when the season begins on 7 March on the streets of St Petersburg, Florida. Getting there, however, required traversing another unexpected hurdle.

On 3 September, IndyCar announced new licensing rules for drivers aiming to join the series. Eligibility is automatic only for those who have at least 12 Indy NXT race starts and either a top-three placement in the championship or two race wins within a 24-month period. Those with one win become eligible for a driver evaluation, while all other drivers must undergo what the series calls a résumé review before they can proceed to the evaluation stage.

Pierson had been widely rumoured to be graduating to IndyCar with AJ Foyt Racing for weeks beforehand, but the new rule threw a spanner in the works – or so it seemed. His first series win two days later at Laguna Seca put him through to the evaluation stage, and in speaking to the press afterwards, Pierson insisted he was not worried about how the change would affect his IndyCar prospects.

“With this new IndyCar licensing thing, I know I got a lot of questions about it, but it’s really not something that I’ve even thought about,” Pierson told Feeder Series. “It’s their discretion. It’s not something that’s been a concern to me or a worry and it’s out of my control. That’s not something that I deal with. At the end of the day, if a team is looking at me and is interested, that’s all I can really ask for.”

Pierson couldn’t go two for two at Laguna Seca despite starting from the front row again. His hopes of automatic qualification were dashed mere seconds into the season’s final race when he was turned into the path of Niels Koolen while approaching the green flag. He would eventually pass the evaluation stage in October after a test with AJ Foyt Racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“As soon as we were out of the championship fight, it’s been an uphill battle of just proving to myself that I can do it,” Pierson says.

“Fortunately, there’s lots of people in this paddock and even on other teams that already knew I could do it and believed in me from the start. Even when I was down on myself and feeling like ‘Man, I’m just struggling’, they were always there for me. And I think it’s something that’s unique to America, how kind and open and inviting the paddock is here.

“Anytime I tested formula cars in Europe, it feels like everybody always has a knife to your back. And here it’s the opposite. People are very open and quick to tell you that you’re a good driver and quick to pick you up and build you up, and I love that atmosphere.”

Moving to Europe ‘wasn’t really on [Pierson’s] radar’, he says, even with time, interest and seemingly budget on his side.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Formula 1 and even the junior series there,” he says, recalling a conversation with endurance teammate Lynn in which Pierson, to Lynn’s surprise, recounted the details of the Briton’s battle with Dean Stoneman at the 2014 Monza GP3 round eight years prior.

“But IndyCar,” Pierson insists, “has always been my dream. Since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to race in IndyCar, I wanted to be in the Indy 500, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to come back to the States and transition back to formula car racing.

“Plus, I feel like I’ve built up a nice parallel career in endurance, so I’m confident I can always go back into the endurance paddock and find a nice ride there and progress a career there again. But it was like you only get one real shot to make it in open wheel, and I figured I’ve got to take the chance while I’m here to accomplish my dream.”

The ambition is not only his own. Pierson is also living the dreams of his father, entrepreneur Greg Pierson, who raced in amateur sports car competition before pivoting his motorsport focus towards bankrolling and supporting his son’s career.

“When he sold a couple businesses and raced locally for himself, just doing SCCA, and it was just him and his brother to have fun, they worked on the car themselves,” the younger Pierson says. “He’s been the biggest supporter. Honestly, with his business experience, finding sponsors and keeping this going even when we haven’t had the most budget to do it has been phenomenal. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.

“And my whole family is so supportive. My grandma, she watches the Indy 500, and she’s watched it every year for a long, long time. So she’s a big fan and a big supporter of IndyCar in general, and for her, it’s special.

“And then for my grandpa that passed away from Alzheimer’s in 2022, that’s why I carry the Alzheimer’s Association badge and am an athlete for them because it’s a special organisation to me. I know what it’s like to have a family member struggling with that. It’s very difficult. For all those families as well, it’s important for me to show strong results and help give the Alzheimer’s Association some credit.”

Len Pierson died a few weeks after his grandson became the youngest-ever Le Mans starter. The years since have taught the 20-year-old many lessons on and off track, but perhaps none as important as one passed down through the Pierson family line: the importance of perseverance.

“We had a lot of really strong cars and strong performances, even in USF, but sometimes things don’t quite swing your way,” Pierson says. “I was very young in ’21, so it was tough transitioning back [after] having such strong performances in WEC, two wins, two podiums.

“I feel like I learned so much there and was really strong that maybe [I thought] the transition would be smoother, and it’s been really rocky right from the start. So it’s been really tough and very challenging mentally.

“But my dad always tells me, ‘Never give up.’ ‘Piersons never quit’ is something I was always told when I was little, and I’ve carried that through. My HANS device says ‘Never give up’ on it, and a bunch of other stuff. I just keep working and keep persevering. And even if it’s frustrating, even when I’m down, I know that you’ve just got to keep picking yourself back up.”

Additional reporting by Vincent van der Hoek

Header photo credit: Paul Hurley / Penske Entertainment