We didn’t know it while she was working her way up the ranks in off-road and stock car racing, but Hailie Deegan had her eye on IndyCar. The daughter of motocross legend Brian Deegan was focused on the world of roofs and fenders at the time, and thanks to the former SRX series which pitted young drivers like Deegan against some of the biggest names from NASCAR and IndyCar, the 23-year-old from Southern California started to think about open-wheel racing as something more than an entertaining sport to watch from afar.
It took competing in SRX and a disappointing run in the Xfinity Series — which led to a split with her AM Racing team in July — for Deegan to seriously consider diverting her career to IndyCar and its Indy NXT development series. Within a week of the Xfinity exit, she was in Iowa, taking in the short-oval doubleheader featuring IndyCar and Indy NXT. By mid-October, it was official: Deegan was headed to NXT with HMD Motorsports, winners of the 2022 championship with Linus Lundqvist and in 2023 with Christian Rasmussen.
“I’ve always watched IndyCar racing. I paid attention to a lot of open-wheel racing; that’s really the only type of sport I watch,” Deegan told RACER as she prepared to drive an Indy NXT car for the first time on Friday at the Chris Griffis Test at IMS. “I don’t watch any ball sports or anything, my life’s consumed by all forms of racing. I hadn’t spoken to many of past IndyCar legends up until SRX. And talking to them, they explained to me the whole open-wheel world, IndyCar world, and that really sparked my interest in it more. So I definitely was paying more attention to it than I was in the past.
“And then I went to Iowa, got to watch the races there, paying attention to the Indy NXT series. I just loved a lot of traits about it. I’ve loved road course racing for a long time. I grew up karting. I’ve done IMSA races and I just always enjoyed it a lot in the past. On the NASCAR schedule, I would always mark the road course races, like, OK, these are going to be our stronger races. Obviously I did a lot of the NASCAR stuff, which is oval, but still liked the road course stuff. It has always been some of my favorite racing.”
The Xfinity-to-NXT move is a new one, and with experience gained in vehicles that are nothing like the low, light and powerful Dallara IL15-AERs that come with knife-edge handling, Deegan’s learning curve in IndyCar’s open-wheel equivalent of the Xfinity Series means she’s effectively starting over.
Undaunted, she’s ready to embark on a multi-year program with HMD that will see her move to Indiana and embed herself with the vast team that’s based on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Deegan’s actions — uprooting herself and diving head-first into NXT with HMD — speak to how seriously she’s taking this new chapter in her life and career.
“Making this decision was not a simple one for me, or a quick one like in the moment, a whim,” she said. “It was definitely very thought out and methodical with the plan of what would it take to be successful in a series like this, in these cars. I definitely am fully committed to doing as much as it takes to be successful in this form of racing. Also, there’s a lot more resources to be successful, whether it’s track time, testing; there’s so much test time that you get before the season actually starts.
“And I think from that side, what really attracted me is all the data that they have, being able to see all of the throttle traces, brake traces; that’s something that I’ve never really had access to before, and that’s why I really fell in love with the IMSA side of things when I did a few races there and felt like I was able to excel at it pretty quick. It was because there was so much data and resources to go off of, which I’ve never had in the past.
“You have all these resources at your fingertips. If you use them, you can be successful. All the successful guys obviously do utilize every bit of that. And also, I think the physical standpoint from it, like seeing drivers super involved in the training and fitness side of things, I love that. With my family coming from the Moto side, the two-wheel world, that is super important, and so it’s always been important to me, but I feel like it hasn’t been valued in the past, and in this racing, it is. If you’re willing to put the work in and commit to it, you can figure it out.”
Deegan will be surrounded by title-contending NXT veterans and rookies alike at HMD in 2025. Owing to the grand education she’ll undergo at new tracks in a new form of racing, she’s setting expectations that are appropriate for the challenge.
“When it comes to goals for myself, I wrote down my goals by the end of the season, and not one of them had ‘finished in the top five or top 10,’” she said. “My goals are about progression, constantly getting better every single race, building my notebook, things like that. Learning about the technical side of the cars, the setups. Instead of saying, ‘I’m fighting understeer or overseer,’ I want to be able to go and say, ‘Hey, I want to make this change on the car. I think we should go to this or that.’ That’s really where I’m putting my focus and goals. It’s the progression side of things.”