Last weekend, Rafaela Ferreira made her debut in the NASCAR Brasil Series, her first foray outside of single-seater racing. At F1 Academy’s Austin round, Ferreira sat down with Feeder Series to reflect on her journey from Brazil to Europe and back.

By Calla Kra-Caskey

The Campos Racing garage was a hub of activity within the F1 Academy paddock in Austin. The busiest moment was, of course, on Saturday evening, after Alisha Palmowski took a podium in the reverse-grid race to become the 2026 champion. Most of the team was there to celebrate, including teammate Rafaela Ferreira.

“I have a very good reference in my teammate Alisha, the leader of the championship. So it’s very good that we are training together,” Ferreira told Feeder Series when we spoke in the back of the Campos garage earlier in the weekend.

Palmowski is backed by Red Bull Racing and Ferreira by Racing Bulls, which makes them both members of the Red Bull Academy Programme, an initiative that specifically supports the F1 Academy drivers within the Red Bull stable.

“We do basically everything together. Everything that she does, I do as well,” Ferreira said on Thursday. “We work very well on the team. Everybody helped each other. We always do sim together on the same day, so we have the reference right there, we can talk about what we’re going to do. The team as well, the way Campos works is always putting three of us together in the end of all the days to talk [about] how was the experience, what we have tried.”

“If I have a problem in any turn, I know I can go to my teammates and see what they are doing. So I think it’s a very nice environment inside the team,” she added.

Ferreira and Palmowski are joined at Campos by Megan Bruce, an F1 Academy rookie from outside the Red Bull stable. The trio has helped the Spanish team build a 44-point lead in the teams’ standings with a round to go. But between the three of them, Ferreira has struggled the most this season, trailing 25 points behind Bruce and sitting 12th in the championship to Bruce’s 7th.

On one hand, the 21-year-old has already surpassed her 2025 points total of 18. But on the other, all of this year’s points were scored in the first two rounds, and she’s last of the second-season drivers.

“I’m happy with the way that I am developing, improving, knowing a lot of things, but I just want to show the results on the track,” she said.

In Shanghai, she turned fifth in qualifying into fourth- and sixth-place finishes in the races. Montréal looked promising to start, as Ferreira qualified seventh and sixth and took fourth in the opening race. Starting the reverse-grid race from second, she took the lead at the start and appeared poised to win before a false-start penalty dropped her through the order. With the field bunched up because of a late safety car, she was classified eighth – despite crossing the line in first.

In Silverstone and Zandvoort, Ferreira qualified outside of the top ten – the latter instance due to a crash in a wet-dry qualifying session – and was unable to recover to the points in either round.

“I think the season [started] quite well. I think the way that I want should be always on points, very consistent,” she said. “Unfortunately, the penalty in Canada made it very hard for the championship. Then after this, some not very good rounds, just not a lot of points since Silverstone.

“Now we show that we have the pace, we show that we have the speed, I’ll just try to put it all together,” she said ahead of practice in Austin. “We think we have a very good weekend of opportunity with a lot of points because you have three races.”

The weekend started off well, with Ferreira qualifying eighth in both sessions, good enough to put her on pole for the reverse-grid race. But in the opening race, contact with Bruce and Rachel Robertson saw her finish only 14th, and her fortunes would get worse in the reverse-grid race. After being overtaken by Jade Jacquet for the lead, Ferreira collided with the Frenchwoman while attempting to re-pass her. The damage for the collision, plus the penalty the stewards dished out, left Ferreira in 13th. Opening-lap contact in the third race meant she finished the weekend without points yet again.

Ferreira’s difficulties in Austin – which were both within and outside of her control – were demonstrative of her difficult year as a whole. She’s had a difficult two years since leaving her native Brazil for European motorsport. As the series’ first female race winner, she went from being a regular podium finisher with three victories in Brazilian F4 in 2024 to grabbing occasional points in F1 Academy.

She’s also not the first to experience such a struggle. Aurelia Nobels was also highly rated upon departing Brazilian F4 before finishing outside of the top 10 in consecutive F1 Academy seasons.

When asked about the differences between racing across the Atlantic, one word was enough for Ferreira: ‘everything.’

“The way they work in Brazil is quite different. So here everyone has an engineer and it works in all the series around the world, but in Brazil it doesn’t work like this,” she explained. “We have one engineer for the three cars that we have on the team, and each driver has a coach.… You don’t talk to your engineer, you don’t have the relation with the engineer, but you have the relation with your coach.

“And then your coach helps you to give the feedback to the engineer, so it’s something in the middle. And here we actually need to learn how to [give] good feedback, how to be very clean, I think.”

Unlike most F4 series – including the other two Ferreira has raced in this season, Italian F4 and Formula Winter Series –  F1 Academy drivers get a single practice session, or two at most, around each circuit. The low track time is compounded by the circuits the series visits, most of which are not widely used in other junior single-seater championships.

“Here the tracks are every time new, so we never train on the track before and then we go straight to the race. In Brazil we are training quite a lot on the tracks,” Ferreira said. “And the tyres, the compound is different. So my tyres in Brazil were a little bit harder so we don’t need to know how to manage the tyres during the race, and here we need to know because the tyres are a little bit softer.”

Assuming there’s no eleventh-hour exemption allowing Ferreira a third F1 Academy season, she’ll have just one more round to demonstrate her growth in single-seaters. Some of those development goals are rather open-ended.

“[Now] I know what I need to focus [on], what I’m doing on sim, if I need to focus on techniques, the way that things works for me,” she said. “[I’m] a little bit more calm during the race weekends as well because now we already know what is going to happen, what you’re going to see. It’s good because we already had some tracks that we are going to race for the second time.”

And at one of those familiar tracks, the Las Vegas street circuit, there are still specific targets to aim for – chief among them being sealing Campos’ first F1 Academy teams title.

“We always think about the team as well,” she said of herself, Palmowski and Bruce. “We know for us, the main thing is the championship, the drivers’ championship, but it’s very important for the team, I know. So we are working very hard.”

As for what comes after that, it isn’t yet clear. Ferreira raced in the penultimate round of the NASCAR Brasil Series last weekend, finishing 18th and 20th with an additional non-finish. She also confirmed after the round that she would race in the finale in late November as well, which takes place after the curtains close for the F1 Academy season in Las Vegas. It looks set to be a bittersweet farewell – or maybe just a see you later – to the world of single-seaters.

Header photo credit: Bruno Terena / Red Bull Content Pool