Nikita Mazepin: Haas Formula One Driver, Rally Raid Racer and Sanctions Case

Nikita Mazepin is a Russian racing driver and motorsport executive who raced in Formula One for Haas in 2021. He came up through karting and junior formulae, finished runner-up in the 2018 GP3 Series and fifth in the 2020 Formula 2 Championship. After his Formula One contract ended in 2022 he turned to rally raid and sportscar racing, competing under a neutral flag.

Who is Nikita Mazepin?

Nikita Dmitriyevich Mazepin was born on 2 March 1999 in Moscow. He is the son of Dmitry Mazepin, a Belarusian-Russian businessman who was the core shareholder and chairman of Uralchem.

He studied international relations at the Faculty of Global Studies at Moscow State University from 2017. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 2021 and a master's degree in 2023, and he also completed reserve officer training with the Russian Armed Forces.

Mazepin is also a motorsport executive. After leaving Formula One he founded the Jordanian-British sportscar team 99 Racing, and he later set up a foundation called We Compete as One to support athletes excluded for non-sporting decisions.

A karting runner-up to Lando Norris who later took a rally class win after leaving Formula One.

How did Mazepin come up through karting and junior formulae?

Mazepin won the Russian karting championship before starting his international career in 2011 at the Andrea Margutti Trophy. By his second season of competition he was in the KF3 category of the CIK-FIA European championship, and he later finished fourth in the KFJ class of the WSK Super Master Series in 2013.

His final karting year, 2014, ended with second place in the Karting World Championship behind Lando Norris. That same season he made his car debut in the MRF Challenge Formula 2000 and raced in the Toyota Racing Series with ETEC Motorsport, finishing 18th in the standings.

He then drove for Josef Kaufmann Racing in the Formula Renault NEC, sharing the team with Louis Deletraz, Kevin Jorg and Dries Vanthoor. He took a podium at the Red Bull Ring and ended the year twelfth in the championship.

In 2016 he moved into the FIA Formula 3 European Championship with Hitech Grand Prix. He scored four points finishes and finished 20th, the last of the full-time entrants. A dispute with Callum Ilott during a session led to an altercation, and the stewards banned him from the first race at the Hungaroring meeting. Frits van Amersfoort, the boss of Ilott's team, called the ban too lenient.

He was retained for 2017 and improved to 108 points, with three podiums and a tenth-place finish in the championship. In 2016 he also took part in a mid-season test with Sahara Force India at Silverstone.

What did the GP3 and Formula 2 years achieve?

Mazepin moved to GP3 in 2018 with ART Grand Prix, where he won four races, the most of any driver that year. He finished second in the championship, only sixteen points behind Anthoine Hubert, and helped his team secure the team title. His ART teammates included Callum Ilott, Jake Hughes and the eventual champion Anthoine Hubert.

He progressed to FIA Formula 2 in 2019 to partner Nyck de Vries at ART. A crash with Nobuharu Matsushita in the Sochi sprint race marked his season, and he ended eighteenth with eleven points while his teammate won the title.

In 2020 he joined the new Hitech Grand Prix team alongside Luca Ghiotto. He took his first podium with second place at the Hungaroring, then won his first Formula 2 race in Britain and the feature race at Mugello. At Belgium a late move on Yuki Tsunoda earned him a five-second penalty that cost him a likely win, and he finished fifth in the standings.

How did the Formula One years with Haas go?

Mazepin was Sahara Force India's test driver from 2016 and took part in the team's in-season test at Silverstone. He topped the timesheets at Barcelona in 2019 while testing for Mercedes in the W10, with a best time of 1:15.775.

Haas signed him for 2021 on a multi-year deal to partner Mick Schumacher, and he chose number 9 as his racing number. He competed under a neutral flag for the Russian Automobile Federation, following a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that backed a World Anti-Doping Agency sanction on Russia in December 2020.

In his debut at the Bahrain Grand Prix he crashed out on the first lap, losing control on the kerb at turn three. At Imola he finished last after spinning twice in practice, and in Portugal he received a five-second penalty for ignoring blue flags and blocking Sergio Perez.

His first race ahead of Schumacher came at Monaco. His best result of the season came at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he finished fourteenth thanks in part to four retirements ahead of him. He missed the season finale at Abu Dhabi after a positive Covid test on race day, and he was not replaced for that event.

Haas scored no points with its VF-21 that year, and Mazepin finished his debut season 21st in the standings with none.

Why did his Haas contract end?

Haas was due to keep him for 2022, again under a neutral flag, but on 5 March 2022 the team terminated both his contract and the title sponsorship of Uralkali. The decision came as part of the wider response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Mazepin said he had been willing to accept the conditions proposed to continue, and he expressed disappointment that this was ignored. He later described the sports sanctions as cancel culture, while saying he saw serious risks in speaking about the invasion at all.

In July 2022 he sued Haas in a Swiss court for unpaid wages, and he told Match TV that he still followed Formula One closely when he could. Two years of legal proceedings and arbitration followed. Haas had its assets seized at the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix during its legal battle with Uralkali.

Sanctions were a separate issue. In March 2022 he and his father were placed on the EU sanctions list, and the United Kingdom and Canada later imposed their own. In April 2022 Italian authorities seized a residential compound in Sardinia worth more than $114 million that belonged to Nikita and his father.

In 2023 he took legal action against the EU, UK and Canadian sanctions, hoping to restart his racing. In June 2023 a UK court refused to suspend the sanctions on an interim basis, which would have let him travel to meet teams. In September 2023 the EU partly lifted its measures for motorsport activity, and in March 2024 it lifted them after a Court of Justice ruling.

What did he do after Formula One?

After leaving Formula One, Mazepin turned to rally raid. He said he would stay in off-road racing for as long as he enjoyed it, and he trained with former Dakar quad winner Sergey Karyakin and his Snag Racing team. He had first tried the sand in July 2021, in a test with Kamaz Master, the truck team that won the Dakar Rally. Speaking after the Silk Way, he said the only things rally raid shared with Formula One were the steering wheel and four wheels, and that the heat made it a real test. Karyakin praised his reading of the lines and his feel for the dunes, given that it was his first time on sand.

He made his rally debut at the Ladoga Trophy in June 2022, then competed in the Silk Way Rally a month later in a Can-Am in the T3 category. He took the class win after a stage victory in leg seven. Scheduling conflicts kept him out of the 2023 Silk Way, but he finished second at the Baja Astrakhan that year and again at the 2024 Denis Davydov Baja. He joked that he would keep going as long as he could still climb into the car, because the sport has no age limit.

In 2023 he returned to international motorsport in the Asian Le Mans Series with 99 Racing, racing under a neutral flag. At the first Dubai race he finished on the podium with teammates Neel Jani and Goncalo Gomes, although Jani narrowly lost second place to Charlie Eastwood late in the race. The team went on to win several races across 2023 and 2024. In 2025 he joined the Middle East Trophy for Graff Racing.

On 29 May 2025 he was named a Master of Sports of Russia in recognition of his rally results.

What happened with his 2020 social media post?

On 9 December 2020 he shared an Instagram story that seemed to depict him touching a woman inappropriately. Haas condemned the video, and Mazepin issued an apology, which was deleted nine days later.

In March 2021 he said he understood his actions had been wrong. The woman in the video described the moment as a joke between the two of them, and the two later unfollowed each other. The episode led to a hashtag calling for Mazepin's removal from Haas to trend on social media.

How do his results compare across series?

Mazepin's career covers karting, single-seaters, Formula One, rally raid and sportscar racing. The table below sets out his main results by series, from his karting finish to his later endurance and rally events.