Nicolas Giaffone is entering the 2024 USF2000 season not only as an open-wheel champion in America, but also with a greater sense of confidence.

Nearly unstoppable for the first half of the season, Giaffone, 19, started USF Juniors in 2023 in incredible fashion by becoming the first driver to win six of the first eight races. He secured the championship in the second-to-last race of the season, when he became the first Brazilian driver since Kiko Porto to win a USF Pro Championships title.

One can argue that his results on the track show an incredible amount of trust with both his driving and his DEForce Racing team, however, Giaffone recalled a time he arrived at Sebring ahead of the first race weekend of the year where he had to quickly adapt.

“At Sebring we arrived on Thursday and I was like, what am I doing here,” Giaffone said. “Everybody’s speaking English and I have to talk about the driving setups in English and I was like, man, this is too much.”

Giaffone said he grew more accustomed to racing in America as the year went along and that DEForce became a place that “felt like home to him.”

DEForce is the same team that Porto raced for when he won the USF2000 title. As of right now, four of the eight drivers who have been announced for 2024 to drive for DEForce across all of the USF Pro Championships are from Brazil.

“Good teams attract good drivers,” Giaffone said. “Because (DEForce) knows racing very well, they know what they have to do in order to become a successful team.”

Another international driver who DEForce signed to USF Juniors was Canadian Mac Clark, who won the series’ inaugural title in 2022. Both Clark and Giaffone took advantage of the $241,890 scholarship prize to move up to the next level to USF2000.

The move has worked wonders for Clark who has already progressed up yet another level to USF Pro 2000 where he has secured multiple podiums already in his first round at the Circuit of the Americas

Giaffone said that the scholarship allows him to keep his racing dreams alive. He revealed he would not have had the budget to advance to USF2000 if he did not win.

“I was very hungry for (the championship) to be honest,” Giaffone said. “There comes a time where every driver has that ‘click’ and I had my click that year and now I continue, depending on the scholarship, to the next year.”

The challenges that Giaffone mentions he is preparing to face include some of the tracks he has not had the chance to race on yet, including the street circuits at St. Petersburg and Portland. Giaffone said that winning the scholarship and moving up will heighten the importance of improving with each and every race.

Another track which Giaffone has not experienced before is the 0.686-mile oval at Indianapolis Raceway Park. He will race there as part of the Carb Night Classic’s Freedom 75. 

Giaffone has not completed a race on an oval before but has completed two days of testing at IRP. Getting used to a type of racing he has not done before has led to him relying on the support of his father, Felipe Giaffone.

Felipe Giaffone has not only raced on plenty of ovals during his six seasons in INDYCAR but won a race at Kentucky Speedway in August 2002. Accompanying his son to testing, Felipe Giaffone was an invaluable resource to Nicolas Giaffone’s growth at the track.

“My father was there with me and it was the time I felt the most connected with him,” Nicolas Giaffone said. “I felt connected to his path because during his time in IRL, they only did ovals. So his experience, his Ph. D. in open-wheel (racing), is on ovals.”

IRP will be only one of the eighteen races that USF2000 will host in 2024. Most of those races will be alongside INDYCAR races at the same tracks, an experience that Giaffone is excited for. He is looking forward to being able to talk to people like Helio Castroneves and Tony Kanaan on race weekends, which he believes will help him remain calm as he takes the next step.

The move up also moves Giaffone closer to his dream of racing in INDYCAR. It is a goal that Giaffone says he feels that he’s inched toward further after winning the USF Juniors championship, even through all the sacrifice of moving to America and having to become more comfortable in a place he was not familiar with.

“(I can) see the joy in the process of getting better,” Giaffone said. “I feel closer to INDYCAR, I feel closer to my goals and I feel more at peace with myself than I was before. And as well, I feel more prepared for what the future brings.”