Photo: James Black
Juncos Hollinger Racing has announced that it has split with its Indy Nxt driver Matteo Nannini, just halfway through the season.
The team put out a brief statement on its social media channels that did not give a reason why Nannini would no longer drive for them in the series: “As of July 17, 2023, Juncos Hollinger Racing has decided to part ways with Matteo Nannini for the remainder of the 2023 season. This has been a team decision to terminate the contract effective immediately.”
Nannini, who is related to Formula 1 race-winner Alessandro Nannini, has finished outside of the top 10 in all but one of the first seven races of the Indy Nxt season. The exception was on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course, where he claimed the team’s first pole since 2019 and then converted it into victory. He currently sits 12th in the standings.
The 20-year-old Italian started his single-seater career in 2019 by winning the Formula 4 United Arab Emirates title. Off that success, he then stepped straight up to Formula Regional Europe and came 13th in a poorly-contested championship.
Rather than stay in FRegional for his second year in cars, he instead made another step up to the FIA Formula 3 Championship and finished 18th in the standings thanks to a mid-season podium.
It was the same strategy for 2021, this time moving into Formula 2 but only completing three rounds and instead spending the rest of the year back in FIA F3 where he came 14th in the points table off the back of a win and a third place but only four other points finishes.
At the end of the year he was looking for options to move to IndyCar or its support series following an Indy Nxt test with Juncos, and ended up signing a deal to make a surprise move into the USA’s fourth tier of stock car racing. However that did programme did not come to fruition, and he spent 2022 on the sidelines before penning his deal to race for Juncos in December.
The departure of Nannini from Juncos’s line-up provisionally leaves it only running one car this weekend at Iowa Speedway, which hosts the first oval race of the season. Rasmus Lindh has been piloting that car since the third round of the season, and will continue to do so.