There are not many 17-year-olds who spend their mornings in a simulator and their afternoons in the gym, grinding toward a seat in the world's most competitive motorsport category. But Joanne Ciconte is not most 17-year-olds. The Melbourne teenager has set her sights on Japan for 2026, signing with team KCMG to compete in the Kyojo Cup, the all-female formula racing series held at Fuji Speedway, as reported by ABC News.
Fair dinkum, this kid's trajectory is something else. Ciconte started karting at age nine and, within a few years, had won the 2023 Australian Karting Championship Pink Plate and reached the final four of the FIA Girls on Track Rising Stars programme at the Ferrari Driver Academy in Italy. From there, she stepped into single-seaters in 2024, racking up experience in Australian and European Formula 4 competition before landing a seat in the 2025 F1 Academy alongside fellow Australian Aiva Anagnostiadis. She was the youngest driver on that grid by some margin.
The F1 Academy, for the uninitiated, is a Formula 4-level all-female series that runs as a support category at Grand Prix weekends. Ciconte travelled the world for it, racing at some of motorsport's biggest venues, and she says that baptism of fire taught her things no simulator session ever could. "Some of the biggest challenges were just the mental part of it," she told ABC Sport, describing the leap from local Australian racing to the full glare of a global stage. Now, having absorbed those lessons, she's applying them to a new challenge.
Her place on the Kyojo Cup grid was not handed to her. Ciconte earned it with a strong test at Fuji Speedway in December, convincing KCMG to take her on for the full ten-race season. The Kyojo Cup, founded in 2017 and held exclusively at Fuji Speedway, is Japan's only all-female racing series and has grown considerably in recent years, switching to F4-specification cars from 2025 onwards. It sits just one rung below Super Formula, Japan's premier single-seater championship and one of the fastest open-wheel categories outside of Formula 1 itself.
That proximity to Super Formula is precisely the point. Ciconte has been transparent about her ambitions: she wants a seat in that series within the next few years, and she sees it as the clearest road toward an F1 cockpit. It's a path with genuine precedent. Liam Lawson, Pierre Gasly, and former McLaren driver Stoffel Vandoorne all came through Super Formula before making their F1 debuts. "I think it would be unbelievable to race in Super Formula because it's the second-fastest open-wheeler category, apart from Formula 1," Ciconte said.
I reckon the Japan move is a smart one, and here's why: the Kyojo Cup's structure suits a driver at Ciconte's stage of development. Racing on a single circuit across a season gives you deep track knowledge, and competing against a competitive all-female field removes the variable of vastly superior machinery that can distort results in mixed-gender junior series. It is a genuine meritocracy, where the stopwatch does the talking.
Ciconte won't be abandoning Australian racing entirely, either. She'll contest two rounds of the AU4 championship, round one at Winton Raceway in May and round four at The Bend in August, keeping her connected to the domestic scene that launched her career in the first place.
You've got to hand it to her for the work ethic, too. Since the F1 Academy season wrapped, Ciconte has maintained a training load of two workouts per day on top of regular simulator sessions. At 17, that level of commitment is extraordinary, and it reflects an understanding that raw pace alone won't carry you to Formula 1. The mental and physical demands of open-wheel racing at an elite level require a kind of professional discipline that most teenagers, understandably, simply don't have.
At the end of the day, Ciconte's goal is to become Australia's first female Formula 1 driver, and the path she is walking, from karting through junior single-seaters to Japan's most credible open-wheel ladder, is as logical and well-constructed as any you could draw up. Whether she gets there will depend on pace, funding, timing, and a fair share of luck. But if the trajectory of the last three years is anything to go by, it would be a big call to bet against her.