Cupertino Inn Worker Doubles as Sprint Car Racer

Adam Christian’s job at is really just a front, a ruse, a steady flow of money that helps keep him hooked on speed—race track speed that is.

“It’s a drug. Once you start doing it, you can’t stop,” Christian says. “It’s a lifestyle, not really a hobby.”

By day Christian talks check-in and check-out times at the hotel near headquarters, and by night he turns his focus on a checkered flag, the kind you see at Ocean Speedway race track in Watsonville.

Christian is a sprint car racer and he snagged a first place win in the 360 non-winged sprint car class at the Ocean Speedway race track in Watsonville on April 27. That win and other good finishes helped put him in fourth place overall so far on the leaderboard in the 2012 Ocean Sprints.

The 28-year-old Santa Clara High School grad has been racing go karts “forever” and running sprint cars for about three years, he says.

Relegated to the stands as a kid, once he turned 16 it was down to the pits where he learned the tricks of the trade.

Pit crews and drivers are constantly adjusting things on the car according to track conditions, he says.

The clay-dirt track starts out “nice and tacky,” he says, but later can turn dry and slippery, like ice.

“We swing ‘em sideways into the corner. It’s pretty gnarly,” he says.

The kinds of cars he drives are the kind that can, and do, flip—though not a lot, he says. They’re fast, have a lot of horsepower and run on ethanol.

When he’s not at the hotel working, he’s in his garage working on his sprint car, tweaking this or that.

Christian likens the tinkering process to that of a puzzle, always looking for ways to fit the all the pieces of what makes the car operate at it’s optimum.

Interest in racing grew from family involvement. Both his father—who acts as “kinda my crew chief,” he says—and uncle race, and he figures he went with them to probably every fairgrounds in the state to watch them race.

At 14, he bought his first car, a 1970 Chevelle.

“I swapped engines in it. By the time I was done, there was not an original part left,” Christian says.

He’s been racing longer than the 10 years he’s worked at Cupertino Inn on De Anza Boulevard and Hwy-280, where he says they learn about racing through him.

“It’s all I ever talk about,” he says.

The hotel logo on his car and a recent Facebook post by the hotel about his first place win shows the support his employer throws behind him and his racing, too.

Asked why he works at a hotel instead of a garage, he says that though one day he would love to own a racecar shop, he doesn’t really want to work as a mechanic.

“The main reason really is I don’t want to hate what I love,” he says.

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