Enjoying what you do for a living is what we should all aim for. When you’re a kid, this usually comes very naturally in everything you do. Natalia Granada was enjoying playing basketball, and she was very good at it. But when she saw how much fun her twin brother Marc was having racing in karting every weekend, she decided to put all her eggs in that basket and fully embrace racing.
Today, the 18-year-old Spaniard is in her first season of F1 ACADEMY, the all-female single-seater series on the Formula 1 calendar, with Sephora backing her. We caught up with her at Round 4 in Zandvoort.
“My brother and I started because Formula 1 was always on at home, and I remember one day my brother asked, ‘hey, how did Fernando Alonso get into Formula 1? How did he start?’ And my father had raced a couple of amateur races at Montmeló and knew the team they’d done that race with.”
It’s not common for twins to race together, but with that family history and a karting track only six minutes from home, it’s easy to see how it happened. Granada and her brother started karting at 11, though in different categories for the first year. After that, they lined up against each other as cadets, with the whole family involved every step of the way.
“When we started with my brother, my father was my mechanic, we had a friend of ours we’d met there at the track who worked as my brother’s mechanic, my mother helped us with everything else. We brought the trailer or the van ourselves, the fuel, the tires, we did everything ourselves, and in the end that was our way of being together. It’s always been a very family-oriented thing, and it’s something we still try to hold on to today,” Granada said.
When COVID brought the world to a halt, their karting slowed down too, but they kept working until bigger opportunities came along. They raced in the Spanish National Championship and also got international chances in Italy and the European Championship, where they spent two years in the junior category. That run led to Granada joining Iron Dames, an all-female racing project known for backing women drivers as they move up the ladder, in the senior category.
Learning From The People in Her Corner
Racing has never been just a family affair for Granada. Along the way, other people opened doors for her too. Miguel Molina, the Spanish driver who has become something of a mentor to her, was the one who introduced her to Iron Dames. That program pushed her career beyond karting and gave her the chance to start testing cars. It still backs her today, even if its program is smaller than in recent years, and she says she is happy to represent them and give something back.
Molina’s own story left a mark on her, even if it reached her secondhand. Miguel’s father, Mariano, has also been a key figure in her career and was set to join her in Zandvoort. He once told her about one of Miguel’s early races in DTM with Audi. Miguel crashed the car, and when he came back to the garage, his boss told him to keep pushing and go flat out again. Granada admits she may not have every detail right, but the message stuck.
“In the end, we’re drivers, we make mistakes, we push to the limit, and that’s how it has to be.”
That mindset was tested quickly this season. Before her first test in China, Granada had barely raced for months, and she barely knew the team. The test was hard, and it showed her how much work was ahead. “There was a lot of work between the official test and the race, not on track, but a lot of work behind the scenes, many hours of thinking, talking, going back over everything that happened.”
The work paid off, first in qualifying, where she earned a front-row start, and then in the race itself. She stood on the podium in her very first race, in China. “Very sweet,” she calls that feeling, and she remembers it fondly.
A New Territory
Her first season has also introduced her to a world she wasn’t expecting. Sephora, a brand that had never before been involved in motorsport, is backing her this year. Granada is candid that beauty was never her territory. Growing up with a brother, she mostly stole his clothes. “People who know me know it’s definitely been a change,” she says. What she values is that the partnership didn’t ask her to become someone else. For her, being a driver and embracing a more feminine side are two things that can coexist without one defining the other.
“On track, I try to show the kind of driver I want to be, and it has nothing to do with ... putting on makeup, doing my hair, and showing that more feminine side. They’re two things we can keep separate.”
She is still learning, and says so with a smile, adding that she has half a season left to get better at it. But she stresses that Sephora has been flexible from the start and has never pushed her to do or represent anything that didn’t feel like her. “I’m a fairly open person when it comes to learning new things, and yes, they’ve brought me into a world I didn’t know, but I’m glad I did.”
Balancing Racing With School “Has Been Hard”
On top of the sponsor commitments and a racing calendar that spans the globe, there’s one more thing demanding her focus: school. Granada always studied at a British school in her hometown in Catalonia, but a couple of years ago, she moved to an online one so her studies could keep up with a travel calendar that kept growing once Iron Dames came into the picture. Balancing school and racing, she admits, “has been hard.” She did all of sixth form online and finished this year.
Things haven’t gone entirely to plan, though. The British exam system runs on fixed dates, a bit like the Spanish university entrance exams, and racing doesn’t leave much room to move around them. Of the twelve exams she wanted to sit, she could only take one. With more races on the calendar, next summer isn’t looking easy either. Still, she isn’t giving up on it. She is looking for new dates and for a next step that adapts to her pace of life, hoping to start something new this autumn that fits her lifestyle. Her determination to keep studying comes straight from home. Just like the trailer, the fuel and the tires, education is something her family has always treated as essential.
“You don’t know if this will turn into a career, so at least on our side, as a family, you always have to have an education, you have to be prepared, and whatever happens, you have to keep studying and keep training yourself.”
Zandvoort Brought Momentum
With all of that on her plate, Granada arrived in Zandvoort at the midpoint of her first season, feeling good. The test a month earlier had gone well, and she said the team was better prepared than ever. Results hadn’t fully shown it yet, but she pointed to the pace they found in Canada, in parts of Silverstone and in that Zandvoort test as proof they were heading the right way.
“What has the first half of the season taught me? So many things. Everything. I think it's shown me a lot about who I am as a driver, the things I need to work on, my strengths, my weaknesses. And with the team I have around me, we're very clear on the direction we want to go.”
The Dutch weekend started with a milestone. Granada qualified third, her first time in the top three in qualifying. But the Reverse Grid race didn’t follow the script. On lap 2, she hit the wall trying to pass Emma Felbermayr at Turn 3, and the Safety Car came out as the marshals recovered the damaged Sephora car. Her answer came in the Feature Race. She finished fourth, collecting solid points that moved her up to ninth in the standings with two rounds left. And the momentum carried beyond the weekend: in the testing days that followed in Navarra, Spain, she topped the timesheets on day one.
Her Passion Away From the Track
When the helmet comes off, and she’s back home, there’s one thing that helps her switch off: cooking. She enjoys all of it, but especially sushi, which she started making at home years ago. It began as a way to take some weight off her mother, who tends to end up handling everything, and slowly became a real passion.
“When I’m cooking, I put on my show or my music, and I lose myself in it for however long it takes. It makes me happy.”
At 18, Granada is one of the young Spanish drivers making a name for themselves in the racing world, following in the footsteps of compatriots who have raced in F1 ACADEMY, like Marta García, the series’ first champion, and Nerea Martí, who has since moved on to E1. With two rounds left, the second half of her season shows promise, but whatever comes next, Natalia Granada’s story in motorsport is only getting started.
Keep an eye out for her at Round 5 of the F1 ACADEMY championship in Austin, United States, October 22 to 25.