In this work we discuss how femtoscopic analysis can shed light on the nature of the two lightest axial charmed mesons, denominated as $D_1(2430)$ and $D_1(2420)$, whose masses are similar but widths are different. Their properties are reasonably described taking into account meson-meson coupled channel dynamics and a bare quark-model pole constituting the lowest-order amplitudes. Two different bare quark-model states are used in order to accommodate the different scattering lengths coming from the lattice QCD calculations for the $D\pi$ and $D^*\pi$ systems and the data from the ALICE Collaboration on the $D\pi$ system. The amplitudes are employed as inputs to determine the correlation functions for the $D^{*}\pi$ and $D\rho$ channels and identify the signatures associated with the lowest-lying axial charmed mesons.