🇪🇸 Luna Fluxá

Luna Jasmine Fluxá Cross was born on 9 August 2010 in Mallorca, Spain, to a Spanish father and a British mother, and grew up in a family already saturated with motorsport: her older brothers Lorenzo and Lucas are both racing drivers. She got into a kart at six, entering through the Spanish federation's 'programa mujer y motor', an initiative created to pull more girls into a sport that had almost none. Within a few seasons she was not a diversity statistic but a front-runner.

She climbed the Spanish karting ladder in the Alevín class, then moved into the big international paddocks of the WSK and IAME series, consistently reaching finals against the strongest junior fields in Europe. In 2021 she won the IAME Euro Series in the X30 Mini class — a first international title at 11, earned in a category where future Formula 1 names routinely cut their teeth.

In February 2022 came the signing that changed her trajectory: the Mercedes-AMG F1 junior programme took her on at age 11, the first female driver and one of the youngest of any kind in the team's history. The Iron Dames, the project backing women across motorsport's ladder, added their support. From that point Luna Fluxá carried a label that is equal parts opportunity and pressure: the girl Formula 1's most successful modern team believes in.

The 2024 season delivered the proof. Racing in the OK-N Senior category of the Champions of the Future Academy Program — an FIA international karting championship — she won six of the twelve races, took nine podiums, scored in every round but one, and finished on the podium in three-quarters of the finals. At the last round in Abu Dhabi in November 2024 she clinched the title with a day to spare, 125 points clear of Lithuania's Markas Silkunas. It made her the first female winner of an FIA international championship since Susy Raganelli in 1966.

'It's the first time they're doing this event and it feels great to win it in the first year. I'm really happy to make history by being the second female to win an FIA Karting Championship since 1966,' she said after the crown, thanking Iron Dames, Mercedes and F1 Academy for their backing. Two months later the sport's establishment ratified the verdict: she received the Rising Star award at the January 2025 Autosport Awards, an honor previously given to future grand prix winners.

After a final karting season in 2025, she made the jump to single-seaters, and the debut could hardly have been scripted better. At the opening round of the 2026 Eurocup-4 Spanish Winter Championship at Portimão in Portugal, in her first ever car-racing weekend, she finished on the overall podium and won a rookie-class race. The transition from karting to cars is where many prodigies stall; Fluxá cleared it at the first attempt.

Her main 2026 program is the Spanish Formula 4 Championship with Campos Racing, the Valencia-based team that has carried numerous drivers to Formula 2 and Formula 1. She races in mixed fields — against boys, as she has her whole career — with Mercedes engineering support behind her development. The stated path is the standard one: F4, then the junior formulas, each step a filter that has historically eliminated every female contender before Formula 1.

Her own account of the title season was characteristically methodical. 'The highlight of this season has been winning 50% of the races, six out of 12, which was really good,' she summarised afterwards, naming the unfamiliar Dubai round as the hardest weekend and her everyday physical training as the foundation. The plan she described then — one more karting year, then single-seaters in 2026 — is the plan she has executed to the letter, a rare thing in junior motorsport, where trajectories usually bend to budgets and luck.

That is precisely why her karting title matters so much. Previous female pioneers reached single-seaters without ever having beaten the best boys of their generation in equal machinery; Fluxá arrives with exactly that credential, earned in the most measurable way motorsport offers — a season-long FIA championship won by a landslide. Whether she becomes the first woman to race in Formula 1 since 1976 will be decided over the next five years, but no one on that quest has ever started from stronger evidence.