BY JONATHAN GRACE
PORTLAND, Ore. – Jackson Jeffers was crowned the 2025 USF2000 drivers’ champion in the second race of a triple-header weekend at Portland International Raceway.
Jeffers’ series-high six victories in his No. 92 Exclusive Autosport Tatuus USF-22 this season proved one better than freshly crowned USF Pro 2000 champion Max Garcia, who racked up five wins on his way to the 2024 USF2000 title.
The USF2000 title fight this season was anything but straightforward, however, with Jeffers not returning to victory lane until Mid-Ohio, allowing Thomas Schrage to enter the championship picture after the series saw a dominant start to the season from Liam McNeilly.
The 19-year-old San Antonio native started the season strong with four podium finishes in the first five rounds, including runner-up results in the first three races before a breakthrough win on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course.
Nevertheless, Jeffers felt confident about his title fight in his first USF2000 year before the season even started. The Exclusive Autosport driver came into 2025 on the back of a fifth-place finish in the drivers’ standings in USF Juniors, where he stood on the podium five times and even made his USF2000 debut in a one-off St. Petersburg appearance before committing to a full-season campaign in 2025.
“Rewinding the clock, the mindset was definitely to come out swinging and get the results,” Jeffers told TrackSide Online. “But I also knew that we were in contention for the championship before the season started, just based on winter testing and all the preparation we had done.
“The expectation is winning, and we didn’t do that last year. We did a lot of hard work over the winter and made sure that was the goal this year. And I think we succeeded at that pretty well.”
McNeilly dominated the early part of the season, emerging as the clear favorite after winning the first five races before missing the rest of the 2025 season due to visa issues.
His five-race run was commanding, with the Jay Howard Driver Development driver scoring near-maximum points across the double-header St. Pete weekend and coming away with a mathematically perfect trio of races at NOLA Motorsports Park.
Despite his stint on the USF2000 grid being cut short, McNeilly’s effort in the first five races still saw him finish 14th overall in the points, despite his absence for the last 13 rounds of the season.
Brad Majman also missed five rounds of the championship after taking his first podium of the season at Indianapolis Raceway Park. The rookie bounced back, however, with three top-five finishes in the last five races of the season en route to a 12th-place finish in the drivers’ standings.
Despite early success from McNeilly and a consistent threat from Schrage, Jeffers pulled away in the second half of the season, dominating the Mid-Ohio and Toronto weekends before securing his championship in Portland.
Jeffers felt the recipe to his success this season was twofold: first, his relationship with Exclusive Autosport, and second, his own mental reset halfway through the season.
“You have that confidence in yourself and that confidence in your team. I’ve been with Exclusive Autosport for three years now, and we’ve just built that connection. I believe in them, and they believe in me. So, coming into the season, we were coming in with a boatload of confidence and were ready to fight.”
“If you can build that lasting relationship with a certain team that you truly believe in and feel at home with, it only yields excellence because being with this team for three years, they’ve learned who I am as a person and my character and how I am on track, and then they kind of mold their development process to me specifically.
“It’s not just to me. They do it with all their drivers. The longer you’re with them, the more they learn about you and the more you learn about them.”
Following his title-clinching Saturday victory in Portland, Jeffers revealed that his mental state and mindset began impacting his performance on track. Having assumed the points lead and the Race 1 pole at Road America, Jeffers crashed while attempting to retake the lead early in the race.
Exclusive Autosport teammate Brenden Cooley gave up his car in the second race of his only weekend in the series this season so that Jeffers could start Race 2 from the pole. Another chaotic race saw Jeffers score just 16 points.
“I started the season with confidence, and when I took over the points lead about mid-way through, a sort of arrogance came out in me that was my own downfall,” Jeffers said. “I made two really bad mistakes at Road America that cost us a lot in the championship.
“Mid-Ohio was a weekend I needed to turn it around. In all honesty, I needed to go home and sit down with myself, sit down with my mom, and really think about what’s going on. ‘Do I want to continue to act this way? If I do, my career will take a plummet and my career will be over. Do I want to continue down this path or am I going to work to change it?’
“Between Road America and Mid-Ohio, I worked insanely hard to try to change my mindset and fix my mental game. We came out in Mid-Ohio swinging, and from there, the momentum was just building and piling on.”
Despite a Race 1 victory from Caleb Gafrarar, Jeffers won two of the three rounds at Mid-Ohio to reassert himself in the title fight with VRD Racing’s Schrage and Teddy Musella. The Texan continued his momentum, winning both races on the streets of Toronto and heading into the final triple-header weekend in Portland as the primary championship protagonist.
However, a Race 1 victory in Portland (his third of the season) kept Schrage mathematically in the title fight, even with Jeffers’ advantage.
A comfortable flag-to-flag win in the Pacific Northwest in Race 2 put the cap on Jeffers’ championship run with one round of the season remaining, leaving rookie Musella and third-year series competitor Schrage to fight over second in the standings in the final round.
Despite a strong run from Exclusive Autosport and Jeffers’ title, VRD Racing was crowned as this season’s teams’ champion, with Musella taking his second series win in the final race of the season in Portland to lock down second in the championship standings by a single point over Schrage, who was handed a drive-through penalty, erasing the 19-point advantage he had over his VRD teammate prior to the race.
Exclusive did, however, take home further end-of-year accolades, with Louis D’Agostino winning the series’ Marelli Engineer of the Year award and David Clubine securing the Makita Tools Mechanic of the Year trophy, with Jeffers earning the $405,000 scholarship prize to advance into a USF Pro 2000 seat next season.
Of his title win and the chance to progress up the rest of the USF Pro ladder, Jeffers said, “I delivered for myself, I delivered for my family, I delivered for my team. I got a championship trophy and some scholarship money to continue racing next year and continue my dream.
“The goal is to continue working on myself and to continue developing myself. We’ll be racing in USF Pro 2000 next year, and I’m moving to Indy this winter. I’m going to be teammates with my old teammate, Mac Clark, and he did USF Pro 2000 this past year.
“The goal for next year is to go for that USF Pro 2000 scholarship and from there, move up to Indy NXT and hopefully win that scholarship too as quickly as possible, and then I’ll be racing the big boys on track, I’ll be racing the IndyCar boys.”
Final 2025 USF2000 Points:
| Pos. | Driver | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jack Jeffers – R | 438 |
| 2 | Teddy Musella – R | 371 |
| 3 | Thomas Schrage | 370 |
| 4 | G3 Argyros | 289 |
| 5 | Caleb Gafrarar – R | 288 |
| 6 | Evan Cooley – R | 234 |
| 7 | Anthony Martella – R | 220 |
| 8 | Sebastian Garzon – R | 217 |
| 9 | Lucas Fecury | 203 |
| 10 | Eddie Beswick – R | 195 |
| 11 | Christian Cameron – R | 181 |
| 12 | Brad Majman – R | 171 |
| 13 | Jeshua Alianell – R | 170 |
| 14 | Liam McNeilly – R | 163 |
| 15 | Timothy Carel – R | 135 |
| 16 | Ayrton Houk | 128 |
| 17 | Wian Boshoff – R | 109 |
| 18 | Ryan Giannetta – R | 98 |
| 19 | Rodrigo Gonzalez – R | 61 |
| 20 | Patricio Gonzalez – R | 56 |
| 21 | Vaughn Mishko – R | 50 |
| 22 | Simon Sikes | 32 |
| 23 | Brady Golan | 31 |
| 24 | Harley Keeble – R | 25 |
| 25 | Kaylee Countryman – R | 25 |
| 26 | Spencer Hancock – R | 23 |
| 27 | Elliot Cox | 21 |
| 28 | Thomas Nordquist – R | 12 |
| 29 | Brenden Cooley – R | 1 |
| 30 | TJ Hoskins – R | 0 |