The best way to describe Yana Kapoor would be to call her a champion.

For most engineering students, navigating freshman year is both rewarding and challenging. For Yana Kapoor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, the first year has been a pressure cooker — and as a Formula 4 auto racer, she’s handled it with aplomb.  

When she isn’t hard at work learning about materials science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she is pouring her blood, sweat and tears into her auto racing passion. She has been wildly successful so far, sweeping both rounds of the Formula Pro USA Women’s Racing Series (WRS) championship in early March 2026 at California’s Sonoma Raceway. After earning top three finishes in two April races, she swept first place again in a   pair of May contests. 

“Working with the coaches has been fantastic, and I was able to get faster in every single session,” she said following her March WRS victories. “Shaving time off my laps consistently was incredibly rewarding. A huge thank you to my family, the entire World Speed team, Jan, Mark, Telo, and my sponsor, Auraah New York!”

As thrilling as victory can be, the competitive process has not been easy. Flights moved her to and from California throughout the spring 2026 semester, where she spent days to even weeks away from campus for her racing schedule. She spent the full winter training with the World Speed Academy to prepare for the opening rounds of the WRS season.

“Mentally and physically, you just get exhausted,” Kapoor said. “It’s hard to just sit down and do like 2–3 hours of work a day. You kind of have to do as much as you can before, a little bit during the days at the track, and then catch up on a lot of it afterwards.”

Despite the challenge of her academic situation, Kapoor attacks it with positivity and enthusiasm. She carries with her a passion for both the sport she grew up adoring and a materials research interest that traces back to a childhood fascination in STEM concepts.

Need for Speed

In their younger years, Kapoor and her brother spent countless hours glued to the TV, taking in their heroes as they chased racing glory.

“There was a driver, Kyle Busch, and his car was the M&Ms car,” Kapoor recalled. “We both really liked the candy, so we would watch NASCAR while eating M&Ms. That kind of started the real interest in motorsports.”

Watching soon turned into doing, as Kapoor’s brother discovered outdoor go-karting and began bringing his family along to the track. Kapoor was immediately hooked. By the time she reached 12 or 13, she had transitioned from driving karts as a hobby to racing them competitively. 

Then, when her family made a move to the California Bay Area, her continued development caught the interest of an F4 team at the Sonoma track where she practiced. She made the transition from karting to formula, but not without adjustments. 

“In go-karts, you weigh as much as the kart, so you have a lot of control over it,” she said. “But in the formula car, it’s a huge step to get over because it weighs so much more. The handling is pretty different … it just comes with time and practice.”

Chasing Two Dreams

Kapoor didn’t just love racing as a child. She also had a passion for tinkering and building things — and life at home set her up to dive in. 

“My dad does a lot of product work with his hands, so I think a lot of my interest came from that,” she said. “Our basement was filled with 30 coffee machines at different stages of being put together. I was just like analyzing every part of the machine to understand how it worked and how to make it better.”

In high school, she experienced a soft introduction to materials science. During a dual-enrollment community college course in her junior year, a simple experiment involving the dropping of ice slabs on concrete  — with and without the surface cushioning of paper towels — proved eye-opening. 

“It was just really simple, teaching us about how you can change the structure of something,” she said. “I just found it so cool. I never really knew about materials before that and that experiment really drew me in.”

The experiment stayed on her mind as she grew in the racing community and pushed toward the high school finish line. Both passions were pulling her forward, but as graduation approached, she worried they might move her in two different directions. When the time came to really think about what she wanted to do after school, she knew she wanted higher education, but was concerned she might have to give up her racing career. 

Thankfully, she had her brother to rely on for advice. He was studying at the University of California-Berkeley and had demonstrated the potential for racing success. In 2025, he paved the way by completing a full F4 season, all while working hard in the classroom.

“He said I should just study engineering, because then I can still at least be affiliated with motorsports even if I’m not necessarily driving the car,” she recalled. “I think that just kind of solidified my decision.” 

Kapoor was thrilled to join the Illinois materials department’s incoming class in the fall of 2025 and already had an idea of the type of material she wanted to study in the long-term. Self-healing polymers seemed like the perfect topic, given their close ties to the automotive industry. Such materials are proven to be successful in improving the durability of vehicles in everything from coatings to tires. 

Racing Forward

Kapoor is a confident person — she seems set in her path and has a strong idea of what she wants to be doing when she finishes her undergraduate studies. On the racing front, she has her eyes on advancing from F4 to the F1 Academy Series. This all-female branch of Formula 1 was built in 2023 to develop young female talent and bridge the gap to higher levels.

“I feel like right now I’m on an incline upward and I just want to see how far it can take me,” Kapoor said. 

A strong source of inspiration for Kapoor is one of her heroes — Sabre Cook, a female Porsche Carrera Cup racer who is also a mechanical engineer. Kapoor seems to want a similar path, hoping to meet new contacts in the motorsport industry as she ascends. She hopes to either race or pivot into industry using her materials education.

She is already thinking ahead to what a materials-related career path might look like and is considering product development. 

“It’s so broad — there are so many fields you can be in with it and there are so many things you can tie into it,” Kapoor noted. “I’m exploring whether I do product development in the motorsport industry, if I can bring materials science into that.” 

For now, that exploration is well underway. If her freshman year is any indication, Yana Kapoor will not be taking it slow.