Speed started karting at the age of ten in 1993, winning titles including the SKUSA Super Pro Title in 2000. After graduating from East Union High School in 2001 he competed in US Formula Russell, taking the championship, then drove in the Formula Dodge National Championship and Star Mazda in 2002.
In 2003 Speed joined Alan Docking Racing in the British Formula Three Championship after winning the Red Bull Driver Search programme. That year he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, and was forced to return to the United States for treatment. Despite this setback he returned in 2004 to win both the Formula Renault 2000 Eurocup and the Formula Renault 2000 Germany championship in the same season.
Speed entered the inaugural GP2 Series in 2005 with iSport International, collecting five podiums and twelve top-five finishes across 24 races and finishing third in the championship behind Nico Rosberg and Heikki Kovalainen. He also competed in the first three rounds of the inaugural A1 Grand Prix season for A1 Team USA.
Speed served as a test driver for Red Bull Racing at the 2005 Canadian Grand Prix, making him the first American to participate in a Formula One event since 1993. Following Red Bull's acquisition of Minardi and the formation of Scuderia Toro Rosso, Speed was announced as a race driver alongside Vitantonio Liuzzi for 2006.
His F1 debut came at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix, where he finished thirteenth. Over his first season Speed showed occasional competitive pace — he qualified a career-best thirteenth at the United States Grand Prix before being eliminated in a first-lap collision — but the campaign was characterised by retirements and incidents. He was fined $5,000 after the Australian Grand Prix for inappropriate language towards David Coulthard during a stewards hearing. His teammate Liuzzi scored Toro Rosso's first championship point at the US Grand Prix while Speed was sidelined by the same opening-lap accident.
Speed continued with Toro Rosso into 2007 but the season was troubled by poor reliability and several crashes. His best result that year was ninth at Monaco, starting eighteenth on the grid. Two separate collisions with Alexander Wurz — at Silverstone and Canada — and a spin at the European Grand Prix ended his runs. After the Nürburgring race, reports emerged of a physical altercation with team principal Franz Tost, which Tost denied. Speed was replaced before the Hungarian Grand Prix by Sebastian Vettel, who was then a BMW Sauber test driver under contract to Red Bull's driver development programme. Speed's total of 28 Formula One starts produced no championship points.
Speed prepared for NASCAR competition with a part-time ARCA campaign in 2007, then ran a full ARCA season in 2008 driving for Eddie Sharp Racing. He won four ARCA races that year at Kansas Speedway, Kentucky Speedway, Berlin Raceway, and Nashville Superspeedway, and was a championship contender until the season finale when contact from Ricky Stenhouse Jr. ended his title hopes in controversial circumstances.
In NASCAR's Cup Series Speed drove for Team Red Bull, making his debut at Martinsville in October 2008. He ran Team Red Bull's No. 82 car through 2009 and 2010, with a best Cup finish of fifth at Talladega in the 2009 Aaron's 499. After being released from Red Bull at the end of 2010 he drove part-time for Whitney Motorsports and then Leavine Family Racing through 2013, including Leavine's first top-ten finish at Talladega, before being released from that team after the Atlanta race in September 2013.
Speed also made an attempt to qualify for the 2011 Indianapolis 500 with Dragon Racing but was replaced on the final day of qualifying.
Speed discovered a new peak of success in rallycross. He won a gold medal at the 2013 X Games in Foz do Iguaçu in his first ever rallycross race, then added another gold at round eight of the Global RallyCross Championship at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He joined Andretti Autosport in 2014 to drive a factory-backed Volkswagen, finishing third in points with three wins. Speed then won the Global RallyCross Championship in three consecutive seasons — 2015, 2016, and 2017 — accumulating ten wins over the period.
In 2018 he won the Americas Rallycross Championship (ARX) with Volkswagen Andretti Rallycross, claiming two wins. Speed also competed in the fifth race of the 2014–15 Formula E season in Miami for Andretti Autosport as a replacement for Marco Andretti, qualifying eleventh and finishing second behind Nicolas Prost.
He announced a move to Subaru Rally Team USA for the 2019 ARX season but fractured a vertebra in a crash at the Nitro World Games in August 2019, forcing him to miss the remainder of the season while he was points leader. Speed returned with the Subaru factory team for the 2021 Nitro Rallycross Championship, finishing runner-up with one win and four podiums in five races.
Speed remains one of the few Americans to have raced in Formula One during the 2000s, and his three straight Global RallyCross titles established him as the dominant driver in that discipline during its peak years. His career encompasses an unusually wide range of motorsport disciplines — open-wheel, stock car, oval, rallycross, and Formula E — underpinned by the tenacity that saw him return to competition after serious illness in his junior career and a vertebral fracture in 2019.
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