Ever hear the one about the daredevil plasterer who lit an Olympic flame in a four-time first-team All-Pro defensive end?

Jared Allen roars at the mention of Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, the face of the 1988 Winter Games and embodiment of Pierre de Coubertin’s mantra. The beaming, bespectacled British ski jumper finished last in the 70m and 90m events in Calgary but won hearts and minds the world over.

After 136 sacks in 12 NFL seasons, a happily retired Allen and an old friend watched the feelgood 2016 biopic that celebrates the life and times of Michael David Edwards. It had consequences.

“Yeah! Eddie the Eagle! Great movie,” Allen tells The Athletic on the telephone from Nashville. “That’s what inspired me to make a bet with my buddy to try to make the Olympics!

“Eddie the Eagle had to work his butt off to qualify and become a ski jumper, which was the inspirational side of it. But the point I loved about it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I just need to go find a sport that’s not on the books that we don’t really do well at and go join that’,” says Allen, bursting into laughter.

And what of the bet?

“The number was pointless. My buddy threw a number out. I was like, ‘Sure, whatever’. Yes, it was over beers… It’s more just a gentleman’s bet. But nobody wants to welch on a bet! I don’t want to have to tell him he was right — I want him to have to eat crow and tell me that I was right!”

So Allen got to work. In 2018, he formed the All-Pro Curling Team with three former NFL players — quarterback Marc Bulger, linebacker Keith Bulluck and offensive tackle Michael Roos — and set his sights on Beijing.

“I started off as skip, no one had curled ever — we were four football players. Life took off and I ended up joining some other teams. I had no ego, so I ended up playing lead and playing pretty good at lead and sweeping pretty good. So that’s kind of where I found my spot. I really like playing second — I think second is a fun position. But wherever they tell me they need me is where I’ll fit in.”

While he didn’t make the 2022 Games, Allen has had some minor miracles on ice.

“I beat (John) Shuster two years ago at the nationals in Denver, we beat a team last year that were top 30 in the world, we had some success over in Switzerland and Canada, I’ve got to play some really tough teams, and it’s been a fun deal.”

But brace yourselves. Just as the Milan-Cortina Winter Games loom into view, here comes the plot twist.

“I’ll probably not play this year,” Allen, 42, says. “My team kind of broke up. One guy in my team retired. Another guy has moved on. And then I actually got invited to play with Korey Dropkin as his alternate this year, but USA Curling and the USOPC put the kibosh on it, saying I didn’t have a good enough curling resume.

“Their exact words. We won nationals and all the trials, but they have replaced me as the alternate.

“And then they changed our rules — we used to have a two-year point run-up for Olympic trial qualification and now they’re taking the top three point-earners for the year based on their year to date, and then they’re doing a one tournament play-in.”

Does that mean that the Olympic dream is… over?

Allen playing in London (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

“No! No! I’ve still got time. I still love curling, I’m still gonna practise, we’ll figure it out,” Allen says. “A lot of people aren’t playing this year. Unless you can go to the Slams, Shuster, Dropkin, and (Danny) Casper pretty much already have the top three spots locked up.

“Everybody is like, ‘Why are we going to travel, waste our time on these tournaments that mean nothing for us over the next year and a half?’. So everybody’s trying to just practise for the next year, put a team together for The Challenger and try to win the play-in.”

Should Allen win his wager, it would represent another tale to tell for one of the NFL’s biggest personalities of the 21st century.

Drafted by Kansas City in 2004, Allen was traded to Minnesota four years later as the then highest-paid defensive player.

The 2009 Vikings are one of the NFL’s great nearly teams, with quarterback Brett Favre steering them to the NFC Championship in the Superdome. There, they were beaten by themselves (six fumbles, three lost, two interceptions and 12 men in the huddle in the fourth quarter to knock them out of field goal range) and the New Orleans Saints, who were later punished for the Bountygate scandal.

“If we beat the Saints and we go out and win the Super Bowl, our 2009 season arguably goes down as one of the best seasons in NFL history,” Allen says. “Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the Super Bowl because we lost that controversial game.”

Allen headed to the Chicago Bears in 2014 and was traded to the Carolina Panthers in September 2015 for a last hurrah. The 15-1 Panthers almost went all the way, losing Super Bowl 50 against the Denver Broncos.

“It was a blast. It’s one of those surreal moments. I tell people it was my least productive statistical year of my career — I was dealing with injury and all sorts of stuff — but it was the most successful of my career because the goal is to get the Super Bowl.”

Allen after setting the Vikings franchise single-season sack record (Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

Allen’s is a career worthy of Canton (he has been a finalist for the past four years). He led the league twice in sacks (2007 and 2011), the second seeing a tally of 22, making Michael Strahan sweat about losing his all-time record (22.5).

The highlight reel moments are many. They include his one-handed sack of Eli Manning and the tete-a-tete with Donald Penn. And then there’s his contribution to one of the most infamous plays in NFL history. You know the one.

It was 2008 and while playing for the winless Detroit Lions, quarterback Dan Orlovsky stepped out of bounds in the Metrodome for a safety. Orlovsky — now a stellar ESPN analyst — can look back and laugh. Allen is chuckling at it still.

“I wish he wouldn’t have ran out the back — I could have actually hit him! It was my sack. I was actually laughing because Kevin Williams had like four sacks that game, so I was trying to catch up to him. He was pissed. We were in a tight sack race that year. I got a cheapo. I got a freebie!

“To my credit, I did whoop the tight end. I was wide open! Could have throttled him. It was a good job they called a safety,” Allen says.

Johnny Knoxville was not so lucky. As the wider public embraced Allen with his signature mullet and everyman appeal, in 2010 he was invited to California to film a segment called The Blindside for Jackass 3.

“That was a fun deal. Knoxville is a great guy — I still talk to Johnny. I actually found out later I separated his sternum when I tackled him from behind.

“We filmed the run where he catches the ball over the middle a few times. He’s like, ‘Man, come on!’ Like, well, if you want to see what I actually do, let’s drop back for a pass and I’ll hit you from behind. So we did that. There was only one take on that one!”

Allen, who returns to England for the first time since the Vikings beat Pittsburgh at Wembley in 2013, will be inducted into the London Ring of Honor during Sunday’s game between the New York Jets and Minnesota.

He likes what he has seen so far this season from his former team.

“They’re aggressive. What’s most impressive is they are getting what they need to get out of their new acquisitions, who are already making massive impacts. That’s what you like to see when you pick up free agents.

“Hats off to the coaching staff for getting the players that fit their system and creating a system and an environment that they can be successful in.”

And he may well come face-to-face with a familiar foe. It will be almost exactly 15 years ago to the day that Favre and the Vikings beat the Packers on Monday Night Football. Allen had a career-high 4.5 sacks against Aaron Rodgers in a raucous Metrodome. “That was a great day,” he says. “Goodness. Time flies. Whenever I see Aaron it’s very cordial!”

But first, he wants to find some decent grub. “My wife and kids are coming, so I want to show them some of the sights. I want to find some good pubs, have a couple of pints and some bangers and mash.”

Who knows, perhaps he’ll bump into Eddie the Eagle.

(Top photo: David Berding/Getty Images)

Of course this was going to happen. It’s only a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner.

College football is a sport where more than three years after players were finally allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness, there are still no clear guidelines governing the marketplace.

There is no governing body with real teeth to enforce what little rules there are for either side of a contract, and if anyone tries, an offended party can hire a lawyer, go to court and add another chapter to the NCAA’s long line of failures in convincing a judge that its business model is fair.

Last week, UNLV starting quarterback Matthew Sluka posted that he planned to leave the program after “representations” made to him “were not upheld.”

pic.twitter.com/oK5BDRpoxK

— Matthew Sluka (@MatthewSluka) September 25, 2024

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His father, Bob Sluka, told The Athletic there was essentially a verbal agreement from January to pay Matthew $100,000 for his final season of college football. Instead, he’d been given only $3,000 for moving expenses, and despite efforts to pursue what was owed, Bob Sluka said, had yet to be paid anything further from UNLV’s collective since graduating from Holy Cross this summer and showing up in Las Vegas.

However, Blueprint Sports CEO Rob Sine said in dealing with Sluka’s representation beginning Aug. 29, there was no mention of any money owed, and UNLV’s collective denied a deal existed and UNLV said it had honored all “agreed-upon scholarships” for Sluka.

The No. 25 Rebels, who host Syracuse on Friday and are near the front of the line for a Group of 5 bid to the College Football Playoff, are moving on.

Unfortunately, plenty of pitfalls exist in a quickly changing, largely lawless system that is evolving from an exploitive Stone Age into a sport that treats players — its most valuable asset — equitably.

Eventually, I believe college football will reach a place with something resembling player contracts, the ultimate fix for situations like these, produced by schools and with mostly standard language. Eventually, college football will share some of the billions of dollars in television revenue with the players, making sure that schools have at least some money to give players.

But this doesn’t have to be you or your program. There are lessons to be learned from this unsightly saga.

1. Don’t do anything unless everything is in writing.

Both sides agree there was never a written agreement. But the Slukas say a verbal agreement with Matthew’s agent and UNLV offensive coordinator Brennan Marion was made in January, months before Sluka made the move from Massachusetts to Nevada.

There are barely any norms. And what norms there are vary from collective to collective and school to school.

“A lot of the conversations I had, the head coaches would bring up money directly,” a player who navigated the transfer portal told The Athletic this offseason for a survey about the inner workings of NIL. “They would talk about the numbers that they give to players at my position based on how much value they deem based on the level of recruit that you are and how much playing time you’ll have.”

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No player is more valuable than the starting quarterback, though Sluka still had to win the job over Campbell transfer Hajj-Malik Williams, who led the Rebels to a win last week over Fresno State.

In February, a federal judge in Tennessee blocked the NCAA from enforcing what laws the organization did have governing NIL. Sluka arrived at UNLV in June and began classes on Aug. 26. In all that time and through three games, he didn’t get it in writing. But he wanted to be a team player, so he kept playing.

And eventually, Skuka realized he went to Vegas and rolled snake eyes.

Fair or not, his decision to leave a team chasing a Playoff bid a month into the season will cost him his reputation in the eyes of many.

Nobody should make major changes in their life based on financial arrangements without a written agreement enforceable by lawyers.

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2. Get the right representation.

There is no agent certification process in college football beyond what some states require to do business as an agent, and the quality of agent varies widely.

Sluka’s agent, Marcus Cromartie, splits his time between college and NFL clients, but he was reportedly not certified to operate in the state of Nevada, which gave some around UNLV pause in dealing with him.

“That was very odd to me,” another agent told The Athletic.

It’s unclear why an agent would take a promise by an offensive coordinator as binding. But it was never made official.

“We tried everything. We’d take payments. Anything. And they just kept deferring it and deferring it, and to this day, we do not know why,” Bob Sluka, Matthew Sluka’s father, told The Athletic last week.

Emails obtained by The Athletic show Cromartie never broached the $100,000 in his brief communications with UNLV’s collective.

Former Florida signee Jaden Rashada did get his contract in writing, but his representation also allowed Florida’s collective to get in writing that it could terminate the contract at any time. They shorted him more than $13 million. Rashada sued the collective and Florida head coach Billy Napier this May.

3. Coaches: Know your collective.

Coaches can endorse their third-party collectives and have conversations with them, both things that were initially banned when NIL was instituted in 2021 and collectives sprouted from the NCAA rule change.

The most effective schools have great communication between the two, and the chief reason for that is budgeting. Coaches and staffers need to know how much money is on hand for a collective or how much could reasonably be raised for a transfer prospect or a high school recruit.

Bob Sluka said his son’s agent was hoping to speak with Hunkie Cooper, a UNLV support staffer, after the team’s win at Kansas on Sept. 13, saying he recalled Cromartie saying “that’s the guy who’s avoiding us right now about the money.”

A later conversation produced an offer from Cooper for $3,000 a month for the next four months, telling the Slukas to take it or leave it.

In the world of collectives, $100,000 is not a lot of money for a quarterback and especially not for a starting quarterback of a Top 25 team hunting a Playoff spot. For UNLV to be able to offer only $3,000 a month for the rest of the season points to a glaring disconnect between the coaches’ vision for their roster and the means of the collective.

Few, if any, coaches are going to make a promise they have no intention of delivering. Word travels fast, and there’s no quicker route to eroding trust with your current roster and future prospects. A member of the coaching staff discussing financial numbers for a player is against NCAA rules, though according to agents interviewed by The Athletic, it happens all the time.

“I prefer to deal with the coaches because they’re so out of their element. They’re like, ‘We can get it done.’ There’s an ego thing — you want to get it done for your position group and your school, show you’ve got money,” one agent told The Athletic this offseason in the NIL survey.

Whether or not Marion made what he believed to be a firm verbal offer, Sluka believed it was and felt strongly enough to leave the program over it. Negotiating the finer points of an offer with a coach is rare, an agent told The Athletic this week, but somewhere between the recruiting process and fulfillment of an NIL offer, the Slukas and Marion weren’t on the same page.

4. Honesty is the best policy.

If there was no money, UNLV would have been well-served to explain that to its starting quarterback.

I spoke with people around UNLV’s program this offseason who were complaining that a lack of NIL support was a big reason why the Rebels were unable to keep starting quarterback Jayden Maiava, who committed to Georgia before flipping to USC, where he’s now Miller Moss’ backup instead of chasing a Playoff bid with a team he helped lead to nine wins a season ago. He threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for almost 300 more in Marion’s innovative Go-Go offense.

Maiava left for much more than $100,000, a person briefed on the situation told The Athletic, but that lack of support is what put UNLV on the market for a transfer quarterback in the first place.

And this situation could hurt the program and hurt both Marion and head coach Barry Odom on the recruiting trail, despite the program’s denials about what unfolded or Odom’s level of involvement.

UNLV said in a statement it interpreted Sluka’s “demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law.”

That might technically be true, but those NCAA rules were already defeated in a Tennessee court in February, and the way college football is operating in 2024 is that players expect to be paid, especially if they believe they had reached a deal.

Blueprint Sports, which runs UNLV’s collective, released a statement that there were “no formal NIL offers” made to Sluka and that the collective “did not finalize or agree to any NIL offers.”

That’s true. And it’s going to hold up in court and prevent Sluka from pursuing any legal action.

But it doesn’t tackle the real issue, which is that he says he was promised money from a coach, who had had no agency to deliver it, and it wasn’t there to begin with.

5. Think through all your options.

When Sluka hit “post” on his announcement last week, he chose the nuclear option. He is moving home to Long Island, his father said; his time with the program is done.

Sluka leaving the team opened the door to him being called a quitter. There’s a portion of the population who will never see it any other way, even if they would also quit their job if they believed they had been promised $100,000 and were paid $3,000.

But he had options. Might I suggest a more creative one?

Given how fruitless the Slukas say their efforts had been to resolve the issue privately, Sluka could have publicly explained his situation, either by posting a video or statement on X. Sluka could have publicly professed his willingness to be a team player, kept working and kept his coveted spot as the starting quarterback for a Playoff contender.

Barely 12 hours after Sluka’s post announcing his exit, Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens reportedly offered to pay him $100,000 to resolve the dispute but was told by UNLV the relationship was already too far gone.

By going public only after the relationship had been severed, he didn’t get any of the money he believes he was promised and in the eyes of many lost the public relations battle.

That’s a tough 1-2 punch, and it didn’t have to go down that way. Whatever happens between now and next season, it’s hard to imagine Sluka will end up in a better on-field situation.

 (Photo of Matthew Sluka:Kyle Rivas / Getty Images)

This article is part of our Origin Stories series, an inside look at the backstories of the clubs, drivers, and people fueling the sport.

As Chloe Chambers navigated the final lap of Race 2 in Barcelona on her way to her first win in F1 Academy, she took a different approach.

The American driver was laser-focused, making sure to keep the lap clean. But with the gap she built to the rest of the field, she could take the final corner around Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya slower than usual.

“I just drove that last lap and took the time to realize what had happened in the race because, of course, while you’re racing, you don’t really think about that,” Chambers said. “You just think about the next thing coming up the next corner. And so I was able to use that last lap to think about things, think about what I was going to say on the radio. That’s always important.”

Chambers is proof that a driver can thrive in motorsports without making the full-time Europe jump. Haas supports the 20-year-old in F1 Academy, the all-women racing series that is the latest addition to the Formula One pyramid. She climbed to that point while still residing in the United States.

Waiting for her in parc ferme after her first F1 Academy victory, aside from Campos Racing and members of Haas, was her father, who she describes as “a very emotional guy.” She added, “I don’t know if you saw the video of him in Barcelona, but he was a mess after my win.”

The hard work and waiting for the right moment paid off. Chambers sits fourth in the standings with four races to go in 2024 but feels finishing in the top three “is a reasonable goal.” And she already knows she’ll be on the grid next season, sporting blue as part of Red Bull Ford.

Chambers has found a way to live a balanced life, furthering her education while pursuing her motorsports career. Her goal? Reach the pinnacle of motorsport—her own way.

“I hope that (my story) gets people involved in motorsport. I think a lot of people assume that you have to be rich and come from money and be from Europe to be involved in motorsport, especially on the F1 side,” Chambers said to The Athletic, later adding, “This year has been the best year for my racing, and, of course, for me having fun as well. I’ve had the most fun this year driving than I ever have.”

Chapters of Chambers’ life may surprise fans.

She appeared on a 2019 episode of David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, which also happened to include Lewis Hamilton. Most know Letterman for his T.V. work, but Chambers knew him for his IndyCar ties. She and one other karter raced with Letterman in go-karts, spending an entire day at the track.

“He was really trying,” Chambers recalls. “He was trying so hard. He even spun out and hit the wall, and they actually showed it on the episode.”

Then, before she jumped to single-seaters in 2021 for a partial season in the F4 United States Championship, she became a Guinness World Record holder at 16 years old for the fastest vehicle slalom. Looking back, she realized, “I don’t think I’d ever driven any car at that point.” She only had her permit when she drove a Porsche 718 Spyder at a record-breaking time of 47.45 seconds.

Chambers says many people notice that she comes from an adoptive family, likely because she attends most of her races without them by her side.

She was born in Guangdong, China, a southeast coastal province that borders Macau and Hong Kong. At 11 months old, she was adopted and originally started living in Texas. Her younger siblings are also adopted — her sister is from northern China, and her brother is from Ethiopia.

“I can remember when they started the process with my brother, but with my sister actually, it’s kind of a unique thing where it actually ended up taking them, like, seven years or something like that, to get it all finished,” Chambers said. “I can’t remember exactly what happened, but originally, my sister was supposed to only be a couple years younger than me. And then I think that was about the time when there were a bunch of just issues happening in China with the social climate and everything. So they halted adoptions for a little bit.”

This detail of her life story remains at the top of her mind as her motorsports career grows, as she’s been an ambassador for the Gift of Adoption Fund since 2021. “We try to help out wherever we can,” she said. “Of course, having their logo on my suit and being able to spread the message as I go through my travels and everything has been something that I’ve been able to continue on with.”

After living in Texas for a year, Chambers’ family moved to the northeast, spending over a decade in New Jersey and New York. This is where Chambers’ motorsports journey began. Though living with an American family, NASCAR and IndyCar weren’t the series that caught her eye. Her family didn’t watch much of either, aside from the Indianapolis 500, of course.

But Chambers remembers watching F1 with her father.

“My dad was always a big motorsport fan since he was young,” she said. “He grew up in the U.K., so it was a little bit more in their culture than it was for us, but I grew up with it.”

Her dad took her to her first karting outing, and Chambers remembers it being right before the track closed for winter. She was seven years old, “when you’re trying out every sport ever to see which one you like if you like any.” She fell in love with it and asked throughout the winter months when she could return.

“My dad took me to some indoor tracks during the winter time. I didn’t like that very much. And then, as soon as the track opened again in April, we were there, and we did that full season together.”

As Chambers puts it, her father was “a mess” after her first F1 Academy win at Barcelona this year. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Chambers began competing at age eight and won numerous regional and national championships across the next nine years. But motorsports wasn’t the only sport in her life. Though shorter in stature, swimming has also been a passion.

“I liked the racing, so to say. But I wanted something a little more and something that wasn’t so heavily up to physical attributes as swimming is,” Chambers said. “I knew I was never going to be the tallest person ever, so swimming was probably going to end at some point. So that’s where I found racing, and it kind of made up for all the things that I was lacking when I was swimming.”

From swimming, she learned the coaching style that works best for her. Chambers said she went through numerous coaches, some of whom she liked more than others, and learned how key it was to have the right people surrounding you to extract the best performance.

Unlike other drivers across different series, especially those who end up in the F1 pyramid, Chambers never made the jump to living full-time in Europe. Instead, she competed in karting mainly in the United States and  Canada and lives full-time in Indiana. She described European karting as “the pinnacle of karting” but says, “I think that there are a lot of drivers in the U.S. as well that have a lot of talent and can race on the same level as the European racing can.”

Not making that jump to Europe did raise a few questions. Chambers’ partial F4 season happened at the end of her junior year of high school and the beginning of her senior year, prime time for college applications. The world was still bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My parents and I said we’ll continue on racing as long as we can, but being in the U.S., not quite making it over to Europe yet, and being able to get some of the European sponsorship as well, we weren’t sure how long I would be able to race for. And even if I did continue on, you’re not going to be able to drive forever.”

Chambers delivered Haas its first Formula series win this season. (Pauline Ballet/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

So she continued applying to colleges and ended up at Arizona State University, pursuing a fully online degree in Business Administration and Management. Chambers grew up managing her career alongside her parents, so this degree was a natural fit. Given that she did not know the future of her racing career, Chambers did apply to different universities as if she would be in person. However, the online format provided flexibility for when W Series eventually came knocking for her to test at the end of 2021 in Arizona.

Her racing career continued with the W Series in 2022 when she teamed up with series champion Jamie Chadwick at Jenner Racing. The following year, she competed in the 2023 Porsche Sprint Challenge North America and Formula Regional Oceania Championship in New Zealand. In the latter series, she became the first woman to secure pole position and win in its history. She believes that moment helped her get to F1 Academy in 2024 with Haas F1 Team and Campos Racing.

But she is still pursuing her college degree, balancing the travel, competition and pressure of online exams.

“I find the great importance in (that balance),” Chambers said, “and it’s also something that’s very unique within racing drivers.”

F1 Academy debuted in 2023, and Marta García won the inaugural championship. Many questions surrounded F1 Academy, especially considering the other all-women series, the W Series, didn’t finish the 2022 season and entered administration in 2023.

Chambers wanted to see where F1 Academy would go in its first season, a decision she still stands by. The category only allows women to compete for two years, and over half of the grid, including points leader Abbi Pulling, will not compete in 2025. Chambers is the first move in the drivers’ market for next season, moving from Haas to join Red Bull Ford.

She’s been sitting on the news for quite some time. Conversations with teams about 2025 began to pick up around mid-season, around when Chambers’ F1 Academy results started picking up. She finished third and fourth in Miami and came in third and first in Barcelona in June.

Chambers will race F1 Academy for Red Bull Ford in 2025. (via Red Bull)

But she had been on Ford’s radar before her first F1 Academy win. Chambers competed in the first round of the Mustang Challenge earlier in June, stepping in for a driver who was injured earlier in the year. She said, “When given the opportunity to go drive a race car, I always say yes. So I went and did that just for fun and, of course, to get some experience in a different kind of car. And it turned out to be something even bigger.”

It was the first race of the year, and numerous “big people from Ford” attended that weekend. Jim Farley, the CEO who also competed, and  Ford Performance Motorsports Global Director Mark Rushbrook met Chambers and hosted a dinner for the competitors.

“It’s also big news when an F1 Academy driver goes and does other racing elsewhere. So I think, of course, there were a lot of eyes on me that weekend regardless.”

Chambers said you must adapt your driving style to a heavier car like the Mustang, similar to jumping between open-wheel racing and another motorsports category. While there is the hope of competing in other series outside of F1 Academy, she said there haven’t been a whole lot of discussions around it. However, “Ford being Ford, I think (they) would love to have me back in Mustang again. It’s one of their most iconic cars ever, an American race car as well.”

Chambers put pen to paper in August, before F1 Academy’s race weekend at Zandvoort. But she had to keep it under wraps aside from sharing the news with her family and close friends. She said the company filming a docuseries on F1 Academy, Hello Sunshine, knew and did attempt to fish it out of her.

A big move is on the horizon for Chambers. And she’s got aspirations to race for wins and championships at “the pinnacle level of motorsport” — in any given series. The American driver’s current focus is the open-wheel racing path, like F1, but she’s open to the World Endurance Championship, IMSA and the prestigious Le Mans.

She’s a racer at heart.

“My idea of success is having a nice long career, maybe some good results here and there. But I’m not somebody who thinks winning is the only way to see success for me,” Chambers said. “Ever since I started racing karts, my dad always told me that the weekend will be a success in our book as long as I drove to my full potential. So even though that weekend might not have been my best weekend results-wise, if I drove to my full potential and didn’t leave anything else on the table, then that’s a good weekend for us, and I think that kind of can be said for my career as a whole.

“As long as I continue on with my career and continue performing at whatever my potential is, then I think that’ll be something that I’m happy with.”

Origin Stories series is part of a partnership with Chanel.

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Top photo via Red Bull Racing