INSTAGRAM Q&A! Alex Taylor will be answering fan questions on the @hotrodgarageshow Instagram Friday, August 26!
It's old news by now that Alex Taylor has paired up with Lucky Costa as co-host of HOT ROD Garage , but if all you know about her is that she's joined the MotorTrend family, where have you been? Besides having nearly 100,000 subscribers on her YouTube Channel, "Riding With Alex Taylor," and starting her own business in college—Alex Taylor Racing—the 26-year-old drag racer has been involved with a number of MotorTrend Group events and shows for years. She's also the youngest driver ever to compete in HOT ROD Drag Week at age 16, driving her "Badmaro" 1968 Camaro to a 10.78 by the end of the week in 2013.
Currently, in addition to competing in the Hooptie World Championship and winning the 2021 MotorTrend Presents Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge Hellcat Grudge Match , Alex Taylor has been on a quest for a six-second quarter-mile pass in a 6.50-certified 1955 Chevy 210 she and her dad, Dennis Taylor, built together with off-the-shelf parts. After a day of shooting HOT ROD Garage, we had a chance to sit down with Alex to talk about how she got her start in racing, her path to becoming a social media influencer, and what the future holds for this rising star.
"It's just one of those things where it's in your blood. It sounds cheesy, but it just is," Alex told us when we asked about what sparked her interest in cars. "I like to say I've been on a 25-year automotive apprenticeship." With parents like Dennis and Debbie Taylor, it's easy to see why. Dennis is the owner of Hot Rods by Dennis Taylor, a custom shop that does everything from engine and chassis building to paint, bodywork, and interiors, all from their shop in Booneville, Arkansas. Debbie has been a part of the street machine and race car building operation from the start, too, laying fiberglass and ordering parts, and generally helping out wherever is necessary. "I was in the shop from literally a couple weeks old," Alex says. "There's pictures of little Alex with a tape measure doing whatever I could just to be hands-on. "
Alex tells us she was always asking questions, always curious about how things were done. "Being in the shop when I was young wasn't so much about cars itself, but it was about learning, and loving learning, and being in that setting," she says. Recalling a toy her dad had made when she was five, she tells us how she asked Dennis to explain how he made the toy, and his answer was a difficult concept for a 5-year-old to understand (indeed, one has to really know Dennis to understand his process), but Alex tells us her dad has always been a great teacher. "I loved asking questions and I would slow them down because I just wanted to know," she told us. "There were all these teaching moments. I remember there was a car on a lift and we were underneath and I asked, 'how do you do this?' which turned into a lesson in how to find circumference and volume, pi, and all that. "
Growing up in Southern California and spending all his free time at Orange County International Raceway (OCIR) during the height of the Gasser era, Dennis Taylor is fond of the 1960s-style straight-axle race cars. When Alex was 10 years old, Dennis had a 1933 Willys Highboy that he had built for nostalgia racing, but he wanted to move on and ended up trading the Willys for Denny Terzich's 2007 Drag Week-winning 1967 Chevy Camaro. When Alex's parents brought the 7-second street car home, Alex fell in love. Up to that point, none of the cars in the shop had piqued her interest the way that black Camaro did. "I dubbed myself crew chief for the car, but my parents ended up selling it. They had their fun with it for a few years and wanted to move on to bigger and better things. I literally cried the day the new owners were driving away with it," Alex tells us.
By the time Alex was reaching driving age, she still wanted a first-gen Camaro, and her parents were willing to make a deal. If she could do well enough in high school to get her college education paid for, they would buy her a car. But then Dennis had another idea: The Taylors had an orange 1968 Camaro sitting at the back of the shop waiting for some accident repair, why not just fix that up for Alex to drive to school? Better yet, why not set up the car for drag racing and send Alex and Debbie out on HOT ROD Drag Week 2013—when Alex was barely 16 and had only made two quarter-mile passes in her life.
"Being in the shop when I was young wasn't so much about cars itself, but it was about learning, and loving learning, and being in that setting." —Alex Taylor
"Looking back, that's the craziest thing I could imagine him letting me do, because I realize now how little I knew," she recalls. Alex was holding up her end of the bargain in school, ultimately graduating valedictorian of her high school class with a GPA of 4.3 thanks to advanced placement classes, so her parents and teachers had no problems letting her miss a week of school to go drag racing. "Dad dropped us off, and my mom and I did the entire week by ourselves, and that's what started it. After that I thought, 'I'm hooked!' I loved Drag Week. I loved everything about it. "
But racing as a freshly-licensed 16-year-old nearly didn't happen easily for Alex Taylor. "I wanted to be the first in line at tech inspection at Bowling Green and we woke up super early so that we were the first ones there," she told us. "I filled out all the forms and got to the last signature and the official said to me, 'You can't race. '" Alex was in disbelief; she had been following the unofficial official Drag Week forum on BangShift.com for years, and had been posting progress updates there about her '68 Camaro during the build—this official had to be joking, right?
She had already seen and talked to David Freiburger earlier that day. If she was going to be told she couldn't race, she knew it would have happened then. "I remember walking up to Freiburger and saying 'they're not gonna let me race,' and he says, 'What do you mean?' So I tell him all the reasons they gave me, and he says 'hold on,' walks into the HOT ROD motorhome, and when he comes out says, 'We're good to go,'" Alex says, laughing as she relives the experience for us.
Despite getting a little more flack the next year at Drag Week 2014 for still being under 18, Alex was off to the races, literally. In 2013, her Camaro—the "Badmaro," a title originally given to the black 1967 Camaro by a friend of the Taylors, is the one Alex now uses it for her orange '68—was naturally aspirated, and since her parents had already planned to go to the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) trade show, they decided to bring Alex along. Alex says Joe Barry joked at the end of her first Drag Week, "She's coming back with turbos next year," and he was right.
While Alex was posting about her Camaro on the BangShift forums, she had unknowingly started to build a social media following. The kerfuffle about letting her race spread through the participants of Drag Week 2013 like wildfire on Tech and Registration Day. "1320" did a video about Alex that year that racked up three million views in a few short weeks. By the time Alex Taylor got to her first PRI show, still only 16 years old, sponsors like Borg Warner and Air Flow Research were approaching her, seeing something in the newly-minted drag racer she had yet to see in herself. "It's been a combination of being in the right place at the right time and having a passion for it, and I've got a lot of good people in my corner," Alex says. Having the talent to back up all that passion helps, too.
Alex Taylor's talents extend far beyond the workshop and racetrack. While maintaining perfect grades in high school, she went to Holley Factory EFI Training School shortly after her first Drag Week. Not having attended Holley school before Drag Week didn't stop her from tuning her Camaro herself her first week racing, though. While still in high school, Alex got her first and only job ever as a brand ambassador with Crower Cams. While working with Crower, Alex learned how a business in the high-performance automotive industry is run, how teams of people operate, and how sponsorships are handled from both sides of the contract—and that experience showed her that she could run a business like that for herself. "Being self-employed isn't easier, but it's rewarding. I'm building something that I created, and I love it. I want to build my own brand—why would I work towards building someone else's ?" she says.
That didn't stop her from attending the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith on a full-ride scholarship, earning a Bachelor's degree in business marketing and graduating at the top of her class. In fact, Alex Taylor chose to study business marketing as a means of achieving her career goals of driving fast race cars. "Being book-smart is a blessing and a curse, because being head of your class and then telling your teachers, 'I'm gonna go drag racing with my friends, and I'm going to make that my career,' is hard enough—they would look at me confused, like 'Why would you do that when you have so much potential?'" Alex says.
But her reasoning is sound. "Influencer is not something I ever wanted to be. I'm a drag racer. That's what comes first as a priority," she tells us, and the opportunities to race are there. She has sponsorships and she loves the culture of the automotive industry and drag racing, so her thought right now is to make the most of opportunity while she can. As she was nearing the end of her time in college, Alex gave herself a choice: give Alex Taylor Racing one full year to see how far she could take it, or go to law school. "I'm not going to law school, I don't want to do that. I love what I'm doing and I've been able to make it a business," Alex says. It's also been well over a year since she graduated from college.
By the time Alex Taylor graduated from college, she had been racing in endurance drag-and-drive events, and managing sponsorships, her own business, and a social media career for nearly six years. We asked where the future lies for Alex Taylor Racing and her response was surprising and refreshing. "It's always a hard question, everyone has always asked, 'What's next, what's next?' and my response is always, 'I have absolutely no idea.' And I'm totally okay with that. "
Alex doesn't want to make claims like, "I'm going to race NHRA Top Fuel by the time I'm 28," or "I'm going to drive a Pro Mod car next year," because she doesn't want to miss any opportunity. "I know I want to go fast, I know I want to drive a race car, and I love doing on-camera work and teaching people," she says. "I'm passionate about the automotive industry—specifically the high-performance automotive industry—so as long as I'm doing things every day that I truly love, I know that will carry me to the correct next step. "
To help explain her mindset about not turning down any opportunity, Alex told us about touring the country with Jarrad Scott and PM1, a media production company that handles everything from SEMA Show displays to Presidential press conferences. Volunteering to work on Jarrad's production crews in her free time doesn't have anything to do with racing, but the education that working with him provided was invaluable. "I have to keep chasing whatever door opens. If someone asks me to come to an event, even if it doesn't directly align with the plan, I'll go just for the opportunity to learn something new," Alex says.
That's how Alex was able to achieve her actual goal of driving a Pro Mod race car (she wouldn't turn down a Top Fuel seat, either, of course). She told Dragzine about a year before the time of this writing that if she could drive anything, it would be a Pro Mod, but as we mentioned, she didn't want to set a rigid goal to make it happen. If you follow Alex Taylor on Instagram or YouTube, you know she'd already achieved that goal by the time we interviewed her, driving Patrick Miller's Bumblebee Racing Pro Mod Camaro, and only because she agreed to take her 1955 Chevy 210 to an NMCA shootout event she was asked to attend. Alex tells us that if she had been laser-focused on finding a seat in a Pro Mod car, she might have missed the opportunity to meet Patrick at that NMCA shootout. But just because she has made a 200 mph-run in a Pro Mod Camaro (in the eighth-mile, no less), doesn't mean she's achieved her lifetime goal of going fast.
From the time she started working on it at age 15 to the winter of 2021, Alex Taylor had been steadily making her 1968 Camaro faster, starting from running 10s in 2013 to 8s in 2019. But there was only so far Badmaro could go as a street car, and Alex always wants to go faster. "My dad is my favorite person to talk to because we both have the same big visions and big goals, and nothing is too big to accomplish," Alex says.
It was Dennis' idea to transform the derelict '55 Chevy 210 into a street-legal, six-second race car, and—once she was able to put together a marketing plan and sponsorship program—Alex was on board to start going seriously fast. "I can't believe the progression that has happened in my racing career in the past year with the '55," she says. "I can't even imagine getting back in Badmaro and racing it competitively right now. "
Always building cars on impacted timelines, Alex and Dennis built the Quest for the 6s '55 Chevy in only four months and have been steadily optimizing its setup for the past year. She wasn't able to achieve her goal of making a 6-second pass during HOT ROD Drag Week 2021, but she did take the overall-win at Rocky Mountain Race Week 2.0 that year. "I love the Camaro, it started everything for me, but the '55 embodies so much of mine and my dad's vision because it was just him and I from start to finish. It's our creation. I look at [the 55] and think, 'I love that car so much,'" says Alex.
Alex attempted to achieve her six-second dream at the NMCA Muscle Car Mayhem shootout in March 2021, but transmission issues and weather limited her to a 200-mph pass about as low as one can go and still be in the 7s. "Eighth to the quarter, the car pulls and miles-an-hour like nobody's business, but we need to work on traction and getting it out of the hole," Alex says as she explains the difficulties in making a stock-appearing Chevy 210 run 6 seconds. "We learned so much about the car testing at NMCA Bradenton. We're confident in the car, but we were fighting rain and transmission issues. "
Supply-chain interruptions and other unforeseeable issues aside, we asked Alex how HOT ROD and working as co-host HOT ROD Garage fit into her master plan of going fast. "Working on HOT ROD Garage is so full-circle for me, because HOT ROD has shaped my entire automotive life," Alex responded. Dennis Taylor has been reading HOT ROD magazine his entire life (he told us when we first met him during Drag Week 2021), and Alex remembers thumbing through them as a child. Then the original, black '67 Badmaro and Drag Week came into her life. "Literally from age 10, it's been HOT ROD. I try to explain to people that HOT ROD is what made me who I am to an extent. If Drag Week wasn't there, I wouldn't be the same. "
Southern California car culture is one of the biggest influences in Dennis Taylor's life, and by extension, Alex Taylor's. She told us repeatedly throughout the interview how much her father has impacted her life, so when Lucky Costa shares his memories of street racing on Sunset Boulevard and going to OCIR on their way back from filming with the "Grand Trashional" at Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield, California, Alex can closely relate, reliving some of her dad's stories at the same time.
But when the crew is on set together, it's more of a challenge. Alex told us about how she never fell prey to the close-minded small-town mentality, even as she grew up surrounded by a population of only 4,000—thanks in large part to her parents' efforts to expose her and her younger sister, Megan, to the world—but when the rest of the HOT ROD Garage cast and crew start speaking in pop-culture references, she gets a little lost. "I now know what it's like to not speak the language that's being spoken. I hear words, but I have no idea what they're talking about because they're talking in quotes. I get they're saying something funny, but I have no context at all," Alex tells us.
"Some people say they're into cars and there's different levels, and I respect it all, but I don't know a life without cars, that's the difference," Alex goes on. "We go home and our conversations are about cars, and work is all about cars. We go on vacation and it's car-centric, everything is cars, it's all related to cars, that's the only life I've known." When your life has been all about one thing—going fast in cool cars, in case that isn't obvious by now—not knowing a reference from The Office or Game of Thrones is understandable (although we were surprised to hear she's seen an episode of the show she now stars in, either).
To be fair, though, Alex Taylor is the busiest she's ever been in her life. Between filming 13 episodes of HOT ROD Garage this year, her racing career, and all the events she's required to attend as part of her sponsorship deals, and documenting it all for Riding With Alex Taylor , Alex is burning the candle at both ends. Even though she goes to bed physically wiped out at the end of every day, knowing she couldn't possibly fit more into her schedule, Alex feels like she's falling behind. "When there's 10 things left undone on my plate, and I know that I was on my phone for two hours somehow that day, because the phone tells me, I feel like I'm failing myself and those that believe in me. But that's a balance I'm going to have to work to figure out," Alex says.
Alex's younger sister Megan, who, shortly before the time of this interview, graduated from college after studying graphic design and photography, has also just come on board as Alex Taylor Racing's first official employee. Megan's job will initially be to help Alex get caught up on publishing videos for Riding With Alex Taylor , but how the professional relationship will evolve remains to be seen. Maybe it will mean Alex has more time to explore her hobbies outside of the world of drag racing and cars.
"Sometimes I go hiking, you know, enjoy nature for a little bit," Alex joked with us when we asked if there was anything she enjoys that isn't car-related, "but then I think, 'that's enough of that, back to racing. '" This is someone who seriously can't get enough of cars and drag racing. As we were concluding our interview, Alex told us how she managed to book a last-minute red-eye flight out of Los Angeles to watch some friends race in the War in the Woods (not race, mind you, just watch) and would be home with just enough time to get ready for the Rumble in the Ozarks Powered by PEAK before jumping straight into testing for Rocky Mountain Race Week 2022, followed immediately by a two-day appearance on HOT ROD Power Tour 2022.
Two weeks after our initial interview, Alex Taylor achieved her goal of running a six-second quarter-mile pass in her 1955 Chevy 210. She shared the news with the world on Instagram shortly after backing up the 6.99 pass with a 6.93 at 205.3 mph while testing at Tulsa Raceway Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "I might get some hate for it when the video goes out, but at the top end of the track I had one hand off the wheel and I was pumping my arm in the air and yelling, 'Heck yeah! That's it! That's it! That's the pass!' because we knew if it stuck it was gonna go, if it made it through first and second gear the car was going to make a solid pass," Alex told us over the phone after we saw the news.
After the lessons from NMCA Bradenton, Alex and her team were able to dial-in the engine and chassis tuning of the '55 210, effectively lowering the 60-foot time and getting the launch she needed to carry her beloved blue shoebox into the sixes. "It's a shoebox. Everybody likes to talk about the lack of aerodynamics the car has, but the car is impressive, and it felt amazing on the top end of the track," says Alex.
With that goal achieved, Alex Taylor has only added one more milestone to her impressive resume and never-ending quest to go faster. She may not know what the next step in her quickly-accelerating career may be (pun intended)—yet—but there are a few things you can count on Alex Taylor doing over the next year. "I truly believe that at the core my purpose is to inspire other people. I don't know what the end goal is, but I know that I'm on the right track, and I'm confident that I'll end up where I'm supposed to be," Alex shared with us as we ended our interview.
Hopefully you found her on HOT ROD Power Tour 2022, but if not, she's told us she'll always race Drag Week. "Drag Week to me is the OG and will always hold the most clout. I hear other people saying they want to race the other events, and I will too if I have time, but I will always do Drag Week," Alex assures us.
In the meantime—were you at M1 Concourse on August 13, 2022, for the seventh edition of MotorTrend Presents Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge ? Alex Taylor was back in Pontiac, Michigan, to defend her Dodge Grudge Match title against eight other automotive content creators in a Hellcat-powered 1955 Plymouth Savoy, built in only a month. While she was battling the other Hellcat-powered street-legal Mopar drag cars, the Rumble in the Ozarks Powered by PEAK debuted on PEAK Auto's Youtube channel . Did Alex Taylor triumph over Derek Bieri and Emily Reeves in the race to end all races?
If you missed Roadkill Nights 2022, the livestream is available to replay on MotorTrend+ (sign up for a free trial today!) and MotorTrend's YouTube channel. The Hellcat-powered Savoy build would not have been possible without the help of Dennis Taylor, but things could not have gotten more out of control for the HOT ROD Garage crew as they tried to build a street-legal race car in only a month. Head to MotorTrend+ to watch the Savoy build on the upcoming season of HOT ROD Garage .