Hailie Deegan feels she has '50% more to go' to ace Indy NXT challenge at Barber

Hailie Deegan moved over from the stock car racing realm to Indy NXT for the 2025 campaign. After qualifying for the second round of the junior open wheel series, the 23-year-old talked about how she has 50 percent more to go in her pursuit of clinching a solid result at the Barber Motorsports Park.

The Indy NXT season started at St. Petersburg alongside IndyCar. However, the premier open-wheel American racing championship has endured two more rounds of racing since then.

Meanwhile, the Indy NXT drivers enjoyed a two-month break and readied up for the race in Alabama. However, weather played a key role during qualifying for the Indy NXT field.

The 20-driver grid was split up into two groups. The first group had to battle with a damp track and had to venture out on the rain tires, and Hailie Deegan was a part of this group. Her recent switch to open-wheel racing and the slippery track amplified her inexperience as she qualified last for the Indy NXT race.

Despite her subpar qualifying, the HMD Motorsports driver talked about how she has learned the caveats of open-wheel racing and is ready to take on the track for racing, as she said (via Frontstretch Open Wheel):

"I think pretty good, I think there were a few major things that if I clean up are worth big chunks of time. A lot of the high-speed stuff is where I was struggling to be in the test and I'd say I cleaned up about half of them from the test." (2:43 onwards)

"So I feel like we have 50% more to go, and there's like a few places that I can knock off a good chunk of time there, and I know exactly what to do now; haven't been able to apply since we've been on rain tires, I think we'll be able to do better," Deegan added.

The former NASCAR Xfinity Series driver is now the sole female driver on the Indy NXT grid, though this was not the case when the season started in St. Petersburg.

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All is not the same at Hailie Deegan's Indy NXT team at the Alabama Grand Prix weekend

Hailie Deegan at the INDYCAR Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg - Source: Getty

In the two-month break between St. Petersburg and Alabama GP, the Indy NXT paddock saw a change in the lineup. HMD Motorsports had fielded two female drivers at the opening round of the season.

Sophia Floersch and Hailie Deegan were the two female drivers to take part in the 2025 Indy NXT season. However, the German driver parted ways with HMD Motorsports a few weeks after the race in St. Petersburg.

This now leaves Deegan as the sole female driver representing women in the open-wheel racing series, and will make her second race start in the series at the Barber Motorsports Park.