HAILIE DEEGAN’s Indy NXT Experiment Crumbles as Fans Demand Course Correction

August 2, 2025

by Sarah Salim Ansari // from www.essentiallysports.com

• HAILIE DEEGAN’s bold leap from NASCAR to Indy NXT is imploding spectacularly, with the former off-road champion sitting dead last among full-time competitors through 11 rounds. Despite a lone bright spot with an 11th-place finish at Laguna Seca, she’s failed to crack a single top-ten and trails even part-time drivers in points. Her average pace lags nearly a second behind the midfield, raising serious questions about whether this career pivot was ambitious or just plain misguided.
• Fan frustration has reached a boiling point, with supporters openly comparing her situation to perpetual backmarker Cody Ware and questioning whether marketability is trumping merit. The optics get brutal when you consider that drivers like Louis Foster and Bryce Aron, both newer to the series, are consistently outperforming her with similar resources. Social media threads are flooded with calls for her to return to dirt racing where she actually won races, rather than continuing this open-wheel experiment that’s going nowhere fast.
• While DEEGAN’s willingness to tackle a completely different racing discipline deserves respect, the results tell an uncomfortable truth about adaptability versus compatibility. Her NASCAR resume showed flashes on dirt and short tracks but struggled to translate at higher levels, and now Indy NXT is exposing those same limitations against drivers trained on technical road circuits since karting. Unless she finds her footing soon or pivots back to disciplines where she’s actually competitive, this high-profile gamble could define her career for all the wrong reasons.

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