Like many 17-year-olds living in DC, Alexander Jacoby got his driver’s license a few months ago. But the Georgetown teen is no newbie when it comes to cars: At the time, he had just returned from Abu Dhabi, where he won a championship for endurance car racing.
Endurance, or prototype, racing features longer races and heavier, more powerful cars than Formula 1. Jacoby drives in a racing class called LMP3, which features four-hour events divided among three drivers. Even at this level, it’s serious business. “One thing that’s really cool about racing professionally is how many people are behind all of the cars,” he says. “In my team, we have three cars, and during [a race] weekend, we have more than 60 people: Mechanics, engineers, team managers, and even the chefs play a big role. Everyone is really important.”
Jacoby is the youngest person ever to drive and win at the European Le Mans race and the youngest Asian Le Mans Champion. He aspires to drive in Le Mans and Daytona 24-hour races, the top-tier prototype-racing categories, rather than Formula 1. “I think [those are] much cooler, honestly,” Jacoby says. “Now in F1 there’s a lot of politics, and it’s kind of getting a little bit rid of the real racing.”
Jacoby was born in Washington, but when he was a kid his family moved to Sweden (his dad became the CEO of Volvo) and then Singapore, where he discovered his love of racing. In 2017, when Jacoby was in elementary school, the family came back to DC. “They were really impressed with how international the city is,” says Jacoby, who attended the Field School and now does school online. At age eight, Jacoby discovered karting at a track near BWI Airport, and during the pandemic he started to kart competitively. He later spent time in Spain to train as a Formula 4 driver. Last year, he made the switch to endurance racing.
So far, Jacoby hasn’t been using his DC driver’s license a ton—he prefers to take advantage of Georgetown’s walkability. He does take the occasional scenic drive for fun, he says, but has to stop himself from flexing his racing skills: “I haven’t got a speeding ticket . . . yet.” When he isn’t focused on racing, he likes to follow politics, but right now, his full attention is on the track. “The success is kind of in the background,” he says. “If I’m learning and I’m winning, it’s great, but the most important thing is to learn.”
