When Spanish teacher Alex Stewart is not teaching school, she spends her weekends indulging her inner adrenaline junkie by working on the race car that she and her husband own, hanging out with drag racers and watching Formula 1 races.

Her interest in cars is nothing new, it’s been a pastime of hers since before she even lived in America.

“I started watching [Formula 1] racing, probably when I was eight or nine. So I wasn’t even in the U.S. at the time,” Stewart said. “There was a Colombian race car driver in the circuit, so it was kind of a big deal for the whole country.”

Fast forward about 20 years. Stewart continued to follow F1 racing but had only a basic understanding of cars until she met her husband.

“He was really into drag racing, which I had never even heard of until then,” she said. “You really can’t know my husband for more than five minutes without realizing that drag racing is a thing. He very quickly suckered me in because once I realized it was cars going fast, I was on board.”

Although she does not drag race herself, she attends many races in support of her husband. She enjoys watching, but her favorite thing is the community within the sport. 

“Spending time with the racers, like the actual community of people who are doing the work on the cars and their entourage is really nice. They are just generally nice people,” Stewart said. “They have normal everyday jobs. This is just what they do to blow off steam, and it’s a nice little set of camaraderie.” 

Currently, she and her husband own a race car which they have done all of the work on themselves. They built multiple engines, rewired the car several times, installed a couple of turbo kits and more.

“Whenever we do pretty much anything with the car, I am involved because it turns out I have nice little hands and they can get into small spaces that his can’t,” she said. “Sometimes he just needs that somebody to hold that wrench right there.” 

She and her husband are not the only two people in the Stewart household who share this hobby because they passed it along to their son Keegan who may be more passionate about racing than they are. 

“I like the thrill of acceleration and the knowledge that little changes to the car can make you go faster,” the seventh-grader said. “I’m fortunate that my mom is into racing as much as me and dad. It means she sometimes lets me miss school for some of the big races.”

By Bella Kamon