🇧🇷 Matheus Leist

Matheus Leist is an entry-level professional racing driver rated 3,977, competing in national-level endurance and single-seater racing in the United States. He holds an FIA Gold grade, placing him among the full-professional ranks in sportscar and endurance competition. His primary ride is in the GT4 America Pro-Am class, driving a GT4 car for NOLASPORT, where he has taken three wins and eleven podiums across 35 starts since 2024.[1]

Leist's career spans eight seasons of indexed racing from 2011 to the present, totalling 103 starts. His most sustained effort has been in GT4 America, where he has established a foothold in a multiclass endurance field mixing amateurs, semi-professionals and graded professionals. Earlier in his career he competed in IndyCar, finishing 34 starts across two seasons in 2018 and 2019, splitting time between oval and road courses. His strongest single-seater results came in Indy NXT in 2017, where he won three races and took four podiums in 16 starts for Carlin. He has also raced IMSA WeatherTech in a DPi prototype and holds recent entries in Porsche Carrera Cup NA and IMSA Pilot Challenge, the latter a multiclass endurance series in GT4-level machinery.[2]

In the endurance grids where he spends most of his time, Leist regularly meets established professionals graded Platinum; he typically finishes behind Sebastien Bourdais, an International Formula 3000 champion with extensive IMSA and IndyCar experience, and Ryan Hunter-Reay, the 2012 IndyCar champion. He has finished ahead of Pato O'Ward, an elite professional and two-time champion, three times, and ahead of Marcus Ericsson, a former Formula 1 driver with 132 IndyCar starts, five times.