Meet the Indy NXT race winner with unique IndyCar team-owning ambitions
- Archie O’Reilly
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
It could have been foolish. It could have been reckless. In many ways, he gambled his entire livelihood on a hope and a distant dream - the route to which was distinctly unclear.
Maybe that path would emerge in the fullness of time. He sure hoped that would be the case. It almost had to be, for not even two months on from standing atop the podium at one of motorsport’s most prestigious venues, Matteo Nannini had been left with nothing.
After spending his junior career based in Europe, climbing through the Formula Regional ranks, into FIA Formula 3 and briefly FIA Formula 2, the Italy native moved to Indy NXT to tackle a new challenge on the IndyCar ladder at the start of 2023. In only his third race, he took a shock pole position and victory on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
On the face of things, it appeared to be a near-instant relaunching of his young career stateside. But soon struck a tale all too familiar to so many racing drivers.
“Racing every year becomes worse and worse because it’s so much budget-driven - sponsorship, money-driven,” Nannini asserts. “There is one real chance in a million drivers where teams pick one driver and they help him out and grow with him.
“But you’ve got to have some backing. And unfortunately with me, [in] the middle of the 2023 season, I ran out of it. And you’ve still got to live somehow so it’s not that you can really spend everything you have on it.”
As is much too common among young drivers, a 19-year-old Nannini was forced to process racing’s savage cruelty that summer. It was a forceful strike of the reality that meritocracy does not always reign in motorsport. That talent and success is not able to be everything.
But Nannini came to terms with this reality in a distinctive way. He did not wallow - or at least did not allow despondency to become overbearing. Instead, over time, he decided to use his experience of the sport’s brutality to be a force for good. A force for change. To break the mould and to do something different. To change the fate of others.
So having moved full-time to the United States in 2024, despite having no racing commitments, he embarked on a fresh endeavour - within motorsport but out of the car.
Nannini had spent the period out of the car building a team of his own. And at the very beginning of July in 2025, one day before the two-year anniversary of his seventh and final race in Indy NXT, came the launch of ENVE Motorsports, which debuted in competition in USF2000 for the final round of the 2025 season in Portland the following month.
“I took the path of starting a USF2000 team with the goal to become a bigger team within the next couple of years and expand it,” Nannini explains to DIVEBOMB. “Because I’m young, I have a different mentality than most of the team owners in this, that they’re definitely older, a different generation.
“The goal we have with ENVE Motorsports is not just about being a regular other team, that we charge the drivers whatever it takes to race [and] if you don’t have the money, you stay home.”
And so Nannini’s vision from outset involved bringing a fresh perspective to junior-team ownership, his goal being that of forging a pathway for talent, regardless of any financial fortitude. The onus would be on the team to engineer the opportunities for the best drivers to flourish, regardless of what they can bring to the team beyond their on-track performance.
“What I’m trying to do here is to be able to create an environment where us as team owners and team members are able to create enough partnership,” he continues, “so that we can give chances to better drivers, who are 99 percent of the kids that are not racing.
“It’s a little bit of a situation I was in from the get-go [in racing]. ‘Yes, we race this year, but we don’t know what we’re going to do next year because we don’t know if the sponsor is going to sign another contract or not.’ And that’s why we started the team.”
The team’s name, ENVE Motorsports, was drawn from ENVE Composites, who are a global-leading company in cycling components and composites manufacturing. They bought into Nannini’s vision and partnered with his team from the outset, with the idea that they could act as “a proving ground for breakthrough performance technologies”.
The team created their base at the Thermal Club, the exclusive motorsport facility which hosted an IndyCar exhibition race in 2024 and points-paying event in 2025. Being that bit separated from IndyCar and North America’s traditional racing heartland is an apt reflection of Nannini’s ethos of doing things a little differently.
But the move was no doubt astute, given Thermal’s ability to act as a “campus” for evaluating and developing drivers, as well as giving the ability for year-round testing on the facility’s many track layouts, given California’s favourable weather.
A presence in the Coachella Valley’s modern motorsport haven also creates an allure for team partners who are able to be hosted in the luxury setting. Among Thermal’s members is a presence of prospective partners, too, which was part of what ultimately allowed the platform for Nannini to return to racing as a driver himself in Indy NXT this year.
“The Thermal Club gives me plenty of connections and friendships that I developed over the past three years that made this happen,” Nannini admits. “And not just for the team, but for myself, too, to be back in the NXT seat.
“With the USF2000 team, when you talk business, rather than just sponsoring a single driver, you’re sponsoring an entire group. It’s a little bit easier and that’s what opened up the chance for me to get back in the car.”
Nannini formalised a deal to return to Indy NXT with Cape Motorsports powered by Ed Carpenter Racing late in January, meaning he had only a pair of test days before returning to competition in St. Petersburg at the beginning of March.
Understandably, the start to the season was somewhat slow - with only two lower-top-10 finishes in the first eight rounds - as he grappled with weekend-damaging shortcomings in qualifying and some fatigue late in races after such an extended absence. But come the midpoint of the campaign, the pace that had been in the car all year started to shine through.
For the Road America doubleheader - Rounds 9 and 10 of the 17-race season - Nannini qualified third and fifth, converting those starts to a fifth-place finish in Race 1 and, after a post-race disqualification for winner Alessandro de Tullio, a storied victory in Race 2.
After a brief blip in form at Mid-Ohio, Nannini dominated at Nashville Superspeedway to prove the Road America success was no coincidence, taking pole on the 1.33-mile oval and leading all bar one lap to win the race. Incredibly, it was the first time he had ever taken the green flag on an oval after a mechanical problem at World Wide Technology Raceway.
“I think it’s going good [but] obviously it could be always better,” he assesses of his season, rather underselling the success of his comeback, even if he is no more than content to be sitting ninth in the standings. “Going into the championship, my goal was always to win.
“Definitely Road America was a great step forward for us, but actually securing [the win on-track] in Nashville was more of a statement that we actually belong there. It's not just for luck that we found ourselves there. I feel like we always had the best car throughout all the other racetracks; it was just a matter of having a clean weekend.”
Being back in a car himself has by no means caused a shelving of Nannini’s involvement in running his own team during their first complete season as a single-car USF2000 operation. Given most races overlap with Indy NXT events at the same track, in his official role of team principal, Nannini is always present to help out when not otherwise occupied with Cape.
That said, while he is very much hands-on himself, he has built a strong core around him that assists with the team’s running in its formative stages.
“We are just a one-car operation for now but we are a bigger team than it looks,” Nannini describes. “My dad works in the team every day and then I also have other people involved [so] I’m not doing this by myself.
“When it comes down to the race weekend, I usually do a lot of back and forth because I also help our driver [with] a little bit of coaching and tips, especially since I’m racing on the same track at the same time. That’s the most valuable information you can get.
“We have plans, as we expand, to add more crews and people. But so far, we’ve got, I would say, maybe the best people in business because we have good engineers that have experience in USF2000, as far as mechanics.”
Nannini hopes that this juggling act continues for the foreseeable future, for while nothing is yet confirmed for 2027, he believes he has built himself a platform that should at least earn him a return to Indy NXT for next season.
“I’m not too old quite yet,” he laughs. “I feel like right now I’m in a spot where I can definitely stay in racing again, especially next year or the year after, while I also improve the team.”
And improving his team certainly remains at the forefront of his mind. Nannini has a long-term vision in his head; a vision which involves measured expansion over many years to come. An extremely switched-on young man, he knows any success in the team-ownership field will come from a patient and gradual - not immediate - process.
But ultimately, as long as it may take, he wants to take his team and its unique model to IndyCar, to show that racing does not have to be exclusively built upon foundations of drivers who are simply able to pay their way through the ranks.
“The long end goal is to have the IndyCar team with the whole path,” Nannini affirms. “If you have a 15-year-old kid that wants to join us, start with us in 2000 or [USF] Juniors and then Pro [2000] and NXT and then ultimately IndyCar, if things allow - sponsor, seat availability and all that stuff. I think it’s very doable.
“We just don’t want to burn bridges too quick. That’s why we started in 2000 - because we want to first experience a lower series where it’s younger kids, with everybody technically [on the team with] not a lot of experience. So it’s easier for us to stay up front and then slowly progress. First we start walking and then we run. That’s the vision we have.”
Through 11 rounds, 17-year-old Wesley Gundler sits 12th in the USF2000 standings for ENVE Motorsports in their debut campaign. So for now, the team is sufficiently strolling - walking with some tentative purpose after a solid first season so far.
But these are all very much the first foundations of a bigger masterplan of taking the less-trodden path to the big leagues. And right now, Nannini frankly cannot know if those lofty ambitions will work out. But he is not one to quit trying. Quite the opposite.
He would never have gambled on moving full-time to the United States with no established current role in racing - a calculated decision from a canny character - if he did not believe in his vision and abilities, whether on-track or evidently away from it too.
“I don’t think doing what I’m doing would be as easy in Italy or in Europe,” Nannini concedes. “The US definitely gives you a lot more opportunities and that’s why I decided to come here and took that bet of living there in 2024 when still I didn’t have a clear path, to stay here and work for two years, just to find a path until I found myself in the right spot at the right time.”
That relentlessness - not foolish or reckless, as it has proved - has gained rightful reward in 2026, foremost through his winning return as a driver. But beyond proving that he is back where he belongs in the saddle himself, team-owning Nannini is making a wider stand in the IndyCar realm as he pursues the same success for ENVE Motorsports.
Because in a field of experienced business heads and seasoned motorsport executives, this bold 23-year-old is not going to be dictated by the norm in his bid for the top - however that may look.
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