Less than seven minutes into her second race at Virginia International Raceway last June, Maddie Aust surged into second place among the 23-driver field. 

The tires on her orange, black and blue BMW M2 gripped the asphalt in the early stages of the 40-minute sprint, during which competitors’ cars reach up to 160 miles per hour. Aust took advantage of a straightaway, pinning an opponent’s car between the track’s interior and the leader’s bumper. 

Seventy seconds later, she cleared the leader — again from the outside — moving from third to first in under eight minutes. 

Aust never trailed again. 

With the win, she clinched her second touring race car victory in her sixth start in the series. She held off former NASCAR driver Colin Garrett, who came within a half-car length of the lead on the penultimate lap. 

Aust had earned her first win a day earlier, becoming the first woman to win an SRO America race since the motorsport group’s founding in 1995.  

The TCU sophomore reserved her second career win for Father’s Day, which doubled as a gift for the man who introduced her to racing. 

Bit by the Racing Bug 

“My sister is a notoriously bad driver,” Aust said.  

After her older sister, Kristen Aust, developed a reputation for rear-ending cars, their father, Nathan Aust, took the two to a racetrack to practice handling and braking.   

There, she took her dad’s Porsche 911 for a spin. 

“That’s when I really started having fun,” Aust said.  

At 16, Aust was a late starter in the race car driving world. Many on the semi-professional circuit have been racing for a dozen or more years.  

But Aust, now 19, comes from a competitive cheerleading background. Cheering for Spirit of Texas out of Coppell, Texas, she was a member of four national championship-winning teams.  

Aust she said she fell out of love with cheer during Covid. When the pandemic halted those competitions, “I got into running, just stayed fit, but didn’t really have a sport.”  

When she picked up race car driving, cheer skills translated to success on the track.  

“I don’t think people truly realize what kind of athleticism you have to have to be a racing driver,” said Trevor Rogers, director of media relations for BSI Racing, which signed Aust in March. “These cars don’t have air conditioning. And you feel the weight of a thousand-pound gorilla pushing up against you every corner.” 

A gymnast in her younger years, Aust’s transition to cheerleading at 13 was relatively seamless. The move to racing wasn’t without speed bumps. 

Nic Jonsson, Aust’s coach for the past three years, said he was lapped during his Formula car debut. His protégé persevered through similar growing pains: 24th place at USF Juniors in 2022, 34th place at the F4 United States Championship a year later. 

Maddie Aust made the transition from cheer competitor to race car driver during the Covid shutdown and has parlayed that into studies for mechanical engineering.

“It’s very difficult to go into a new sport because your mindset is that ‘I was one of the best in [cheerleading and gymnastics]. Am I gonna come in here and start off where I finished off?’ ” Jonsson said. “It doesn’t quite work that way.” 

Jonsson said Aust’s perseverance led to the pair of historic victories in Virginia. 

“She’s been hurt so many times falling on her head and shoulders from doing gymnastics. So nothing really fazes her,” Jonsson said. “She’s not afraid of trying.” 

“From the day she was born, she’s always been that fighter, go-getter, no fear, her whole life,” said her mom, Jena Aust. “She was wakeboarding when she was two years old.” 

An Engineer at Heart

Aust, who attended Fort Worth Country Day, first aimed to pursue a career in medicine.  

“I’m a big math-science person,” Aust said. “As I got into racing and learning about fundamentals of how things work, that really interested me. So it led me down the engineering path.” 

Aust is now pursuing a mechanical engineering degree at TCU’s College of Science & Engineering. 

The academic interest translates to the sport, wrote Alex Perry, Aust’s performance engineer. “She wants to be able to understand the effects of the changes that can be made to the car, not just why you would change one aspect of the car to help.” 

Aust is fluent in mechanical engineering speak, Jonsson said. She dissects film from practice and race days and wears a fitness tracker to log her heart rate and sleep patterns. Aust stays knee-deep in data and drafts detailed track maps.

“We come in from sessions, and I’ll write notes on things I need to change,” Aust said. “Let’s say I need to break 50 feet deeper on turn one to gain two-tenths of a second. I’ll write that in my notes.”  

Her training regimen, prescribed by Jonsson, encompasses five weekly workouts, a strict nutrition program and constant monitoring of hydration levels.  

Such dedication is “very hard to find today by any of these young drivers because most of them, quite honestly, are spoiled,” Jonsson said. “Between races, she’s out there, a hundred-degree heat out in the garage: striping, polishing, taking cars apart, taking the wheels off, cleaning brakes.” 

Maddie Aust cites the Porsche 992 among her favorite cars to drive, though some of her biggest wins have come behind the wheel of a BMW M2 (pictured). Courtesy of Lucky Seven Photography

Humble History Maker

Of the 45 drivers competing in the GR Cup North America Series — an amateur racing series “designed to be inclusive of a wide variety of competitors,” according to Toyota’s website — Aust is among the few women on the circuit.  

After a pair of podium finishes at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas in 2023, fans started following her in droves, Perry said. 

“Her popularity blew up, and people noticed her at every track we went to,” Perry wrote. “People that come to check out the race weekends tend to bring their daughters or granddaughters back the next day because they want to show them that they can do anything.” 

Not all the attention is positive. 

“She embraces the challenge, the criticisms that come with it,” Rogers said. “You see the nasty comments of people saying, ‘Oh, she gets these opportunities because she’s a she.’ She embraces the cold edge that comes with that.”  

Aust keeps her gaze forward, and the wins keep coming. She said she hopes that momentum carries her to more competitive circuits overseas. “I am hoping to get over to Europe just because it is a bit more intense over there with the style of racing that I’m doing.” 

Speaking at BMW’s inaugural Women in Motion Conference in March, Aust said she downplayed the significance of being a female driver.  

“I know a lot of people have been harping on that. It’s like ‘females in motorsport,’ ‘women in motorsport.’ But the car doesn’t know the difference,” Aust said. “I want to promote more girls getting into the sport. But I don’t think about it so much as being a trailblazer. I’m just promoting what I love.”