Haberfeld rose through the junior ranks to claim the British Formula 3 Championship title in 1998, a result that earned him testing opportunities with several Formula One teams. Stewart Grand Prix invited him to test in 1998, McLaren followed in 1999, and Jordan ran him in 2001. Despite these evaluations, a race seat in Formula One never materialised.
Following his British F3 success, Haberfeld competed in the International Formula 3000 series from 1999 through 2002. His first season was difficult; driving for the McLaren junior programme, he failed to score a single point while his teammate Nick Heidfeld won the championship outright. Subsequent seasons brought modest improvement but no breakthrough results, and Haberfeld eventually looked beyond European single-seaters for the next chapter of his career.
In 2003, Haberfeld crossed the Atlantic to join the Champ Car World Series with Mi-Jack Conquest Racing. His team shared technical information and a Reynard chassis lineage with a fellow rookie outfit — Emerson Fittipaldi's team, which ran future Formula One driver Tiago Monteiro. Haberfeld made an immediate impression, recording a fourth-place finish on his debut at St. Petersburg.
He returned for the 2004 season with Derrick Walker's team, operating as essentially the lone Reynard entrant in the series. Despite limited resources, he delivered another pair of top-five finishes, demonstrating consistent pace. No team signed him for 2005, though he contested several Grand-Am races for Tuttle Team Racing late in the year. He also competed in the Rolex Grand Am series alongside Adrian Fernández, who served as both his teammate and team owner during that period.
Haberfeld's professional motorsport career largely wound down after the mid-2000s. In 2019, he returned briefly to competitive driving in the Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy — a support series for Formula E featuring electric SUVs — representing Jaguar Brazil Racing. He stepped in as a temporary replacement for Cacá Bueno, completing a minor but notable late-career footnote.
Haberfeld's second career has proved more far-reaching than his first. In 2011 he founded Onçafari, a conservation organisation dedicated to jaguar rewilding and habitat protection across multiple Brazilian biomes. Beginning in the Pantanal, the programme expanded into the Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, and Amazon, introducing fire prevention initiatives, biodiversity monitoring, and community engagement projects alongside scientific research.
Under his leadership, Onçafari became one of Brazil's most prominent conservation bodies, recognised in 2024 as one of the country's Top 100 NGOs. Haberfeld collaborated with government agencies, private landowners, and international organisations to develop wildlife-friendly economic models that integrate ecotourism with conservation outcomes. His advocacy contributed to the expansion of protected areas and to the successful reintroduction of jaguars and other species into habitats where they had disappeared.
He has also authored and co-authored several books on the subject, including Alma Selvagem / Wild Soul (2011), a bilingual Portuguese-English volume combining wildlife photography with conservation insight, and A Onça na Cultura Pantaneira (2017), which examines the cultural place of the jaguar in the Pantanal region. A third co-authored work, Panthera Onca: À Sombra das Florestas, surveys jaguar populations across Brazil's interior.
Haberfeld's conservation story has been documented in BBC productions, including Jaguar Brazil's Super Cats (2016–2017) and the third episode of Planet Earth III (2023), and he has delivered a TED Talk on the urgency of jaguar conservation.
Haberfeld occupies an unusual position in Brazilian motorsport: a driver who reached the upper tier of European single-seater racing, made a credible transition to American open-wheel competition, and then reinvented himself entirely as a conservationist of international standing. His work with Onçafari represents a sustained effort to address biodiversity loss in Brazil and has drawn global attention to the challenges facing the jaguar in its native range.