Stockcar
RACING TOWARD PEACE
Custom car builder, content creator and budding actress Emelia Hartford has found much-needed serenity—at very high speed.
Driving north on L.A.’s 5 freeway, Emelia Hartford’s glimmering teal Ferrari 458 on a Tuesday afternoon doesn’t exactly blend in with the other cars. So it’s unsurprising when, less than five miles from her starting point, a highway patrolman finds a reason to pull her over. He keeps her for several minutes, chatting with her through the window, then lets her leave.
An hour later, on the side of a desolate road in the San Gabriel Mountains, Hartford, who’s in her late 20s, swings a denim-clad leg out of the low-slung vehicle and explains that the stop was all a misunderstanding. Plus, the cop got a little starstruck. “He recognized me,” she says, “and let me go.”
The Car Expert: Emelia Hartford in her Ferrari 458.
© Heidi Zumbrun
I don't do what I do to shove it in anyone's face...you either treat me like an equal or you don't.
This is Hartford’s blessing and curse. As one of a very few women in the car building and racing industries, she holds a high profile as a creator. Between YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, she has some 3.6 million followers. Fans tune in as she modifies her fleet of 12 vehicles and ride along when she takes the cars to drag strips or drifting areas to see how much speed she can get.
Lately, Hartford’s followers have also seen her star rise. Along with her thriving auto career, she’s taken on acting jobs and television-hosting gigs and appeared in high-profile magazines and podcasts. Sitting behind a black desk in the office of her L.A.-area shop—which currently houses two Chevrolet Corvette C8s, a big-block Ford Mustang and the now-idle Ferrari, as well as scattered bumpers, tires and tools—she takes a moment to reflect on all she’s done so far.
“This is a crazy career,” says Hartford. “I’ve been able to meet some incredible people. I’m just very thankful.”
Life wasn’t always like this for Hartford. She discovered the car community as a teenager in the wake of tragedy and it quickly became her found family. Later, when she decided to take to social media to document her various vehicle builds, it was, in some ways, an effort to set herself apart from other aspiring actors in a ruthlessly competitive industry.
Since then, she’s faced sexism in the business and her fair share of people who don’t think she can drive because she’s a woman. But she takes it all in stride.
Hartford’s L.A.-area garage: Corvette C8s, Nissan 240SX and Ford Mustang.
© Heidi Zumbrun
“I don’t do what I do to shove it in anyone’s face, but I can do it, too,” she says, steady under the glare of the shop’s fluorescent lights. “You either treat me like an equal or you don’t.” And while barreling down drag strips at nearly 150 miles per hour may not seem very Zen, Hartford says it’s one of the only moments she ever feels at peace. “There are only two times I ever truly feel present in this world,” she says. “One is when I’m acting, living moment to moment with another person, and two is when I’m driving behind the wheel.” Hartford grew up in Southern California, a hotbed of custom-car culture. And it seemed, from a very young age, that piloting vehicles was part of her DNA.
“The moment she became mobile she was on a bicycle,” says Cheryl, Hartford’s mother. “When she got her electric Barbie Jeep, she could back that thing up and turn it around and do spinouts. She drove it better than her grandpa drove his real Jeep. It was pretty impressive.” Her attraction to risk wasn’t limited to cars and bikes. Cheryl recalls hearing a neighbor scream when Emelia scaled a 40-foot tree, and in a later incident, sprinting to the rescue after Emelia leapt off the top of a set of monkey bars, yelling in midair, “Mommy, catch me!”
“There was always an adventure,” Cheryl says. “I need a T-shirt saying ‘I survived my daughter.’ ” Hartford also knew from a young age that she wanted to be an actor. When she was a child, her father was trying to find his footing as a producer and filmmaker. Every Sunday, the family would go to the movies together.
There was always an adventure, says Emelia's mom. I need a T-shirt saying 'I survived my daughter.'
Emelia Hartford digging through her bunch of tools, ready to get working.
© Heidi Zumbrun
“I was obsessed with it,” Hartford says. “It’s the earliest thought I remember: I want to act. It’s just something that I’ve always, deep down, known that I need to pursue in this lifetime.”
The family lived in Westlake Village, an idyllic suburb about 45 minutes northwest of Los Angeles. Hartford’s mother stayed at home with Emelia and her brother while her father worked. As a teenager, Hartford was a bit of an outsider. She played video games and wanted to emulate Jackass by crashing her scooter into curbs. “I didn’t really fit in,” she says. “I dressed like a boy, acted like a boy. That was kind of my life.” All appeared well on the outside, but behind closed doors it was a different story. Her father, Hartford says, was addicted to pills and alcohol. He abused the family physically and emotionally. And when she was in high school, she says, his mental health took a downward turn.
According to news reports at the time, one of Glen Hartford’s films, a passion project, was on the verge of release when the FBI raided his office on charges of fraud. Emelia, 15 at the time, could tell something was wrong. “The last conversation I had with him, he was walking out the door and I remember running up to him being like, ‘Are you gonna come home?’ ” she says. “He’s like, ‘Why, do you want me to?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He’s like, ‘OK, then I’ll come home.’ And then he did it the next morning.”
Glen Hartford shot himself while sitting in his car in the parking lot of a strip mall. He was 45. Hartford went to school the next day, unsure of how else to respond. She processed the tragedy slowly, in her own way, but remains conflicted about it to this day. Along with the pain he left in his wake, she still remembers the Sunday movies, blasting Queen on the freeway, eating chili cheese fries from Johnny Rockets with him after dance class.
There are only two times I feel Present in this world: when I'm acting and when I'm driving behind the wheel.
Even at a young age, Hartford was a natural pilot.
© Heidi Zumbrun
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead in any way,” she says. “I’m here because of him. I’m where I am because of what happened. I did love him, but it was a rough upbringing.”
After her father died, Hartford’s family’s situation changed drastically. Her mother began looking for a job, and Emelia and her brother were “thrown to the wolves,” she says. In a coincidence of timing, though, her father’s death occurred just weeks before she was scheduled to get her driver’s license.
“All I could think about after my dad passed was, ‘I need to get out of this house,’ ” she says. “I just needed that sense of freedom.”
Freedom, to Hartford, sounded like four wheels, a powerful engine and the open road. With no one to advise her otherwise, she turned to the internet to determine what type of car to get. What she didn’t realize at the time, she says, was that “the internet is biased” toward high-speed, easily modified vehicles. “I went on these car forums and they’re like, you need something that’s rear-wheel-drive,” she says. “It needs to be bigger than a four cylinder and it needs to be a stick.”
She wound up buying a 2005 Infiniti G35 with a V6 engine. She had never driven a stick shift, but it quickly became an obsession. Once she’d mastered it, she wanted to learn how to go faster out of turns, then how to apex, then how to heel-toe shift.
“These different driving styles that I saw as more of an art form gave me something to focus on,” she says.
While Hartford was learning to drive on the SoCal canyon roads, though, her mother was trying to keep the family afloat. Within months, Cheryl decided to go back to college and moved the family to Bloomington, Indiana, where they’d be closer to relatives. “Leaving California was tough because all of our friends were there,” says Cheryl. “It was like starting all over. And I have to admit, it was a little rough in the beginning because it’s a bit of a culture shock.”
What Cheryl didn’t know was that the move would shape Hartford’s life in ways no one could have predicted. The then- 16-year-old made friends quickly and one afternoon, as she was cruising through town in her Infiniti, a Crown Victoria pulled up alongside. Her passenger rolled down the window and yelled to the driver, “Don’t you love my friend’s car?”
In response, the stranger handed Hartford a piece of paper with a time and location, inviting her to a car show. The show started at midnight in the middle of downtown Bloomington, at the top of a parking garage. When Hartford arrived, she saw rows of cars with myriad modifications. “It felt like out of a movie, like Fast and Furious,” she says. “It was really neat. And that’s how I met Bcrew.”
Hartford first learned how to modify cars thanks to Bcrew.
© Heidi Zumbrun
She's just a natural wrench. She has motor oil in her veins.
Bcrew, short for Bloomington crew, would become Hartford’s found family. Through years of friendship and weekly get-togethers, she gained the foundation for what she does with car builds today. Ryan “Booch” Hummel was a core member of the Bcrew and eventually became Hartford’s close friend and mentor. He says that from the moment she stepped into the crew’s garage, it was clear she was cut out for the work.
“She’s just a natural wrench,” he says, using insider slang for mechanic. “She’s got that mechanical mind, where the gears are physically turning in the transmission. I swear she has gears in her brain. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she has motor oil in her veins.”
Hummel and her other mentors in Bcrew put Hartford on a path by teaching her basic mechanics, but she was always interested in speed. “While I was trying to introduce her to stuff like brake jobs and tune-ups, she had her eyes more on the engine blocks and the engine building that were on the stands, or the turbocharger sitting around,” Hummel says. “Having been a part of this club for 15, 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go. Emelia was a cut above the rest. I’ve never seen anyone take to it on the level that she did.”
For Hartford, the group did more than just teach her mechanics. “This group of guys essentially became like my big brothers, fatherly figures who took me under their wings,” she says. “Instead of partying on the weekends, we were swapping turbos and pulling heads on engines. And I was really grateful for that.”
She began racing at autocross events held by the local chapter of the Sports Car Club of America and was winning in her class. But it wasn’t long before she heard Hollywood calling her back. Her dream of becoming an actor had only intensified, and while she loved the car community in Indiana, she knew it was time to give it a real shot. She’d swapped her Infiniti for a Nissan 240SX, and with her mother’s blessing, she packed everything she could fit into it and drove back to L.A.
Bcrew mentors: Hartford says they did more than just teach her mechanics.
© Heidi Zumbrun
"They became like my big brothers." - Emelia Harford on the Bcrew.
© Heidi Zumbrun
For years, Hartford struggled in Hollywood the old-fashioned way. She bussed and waited tables, sent her headshots to agents and casting directors and dutifully took classes and read plays. In her free time, she threw herself into modifying and building out her cars and posted videos of her work on Instagram.
It didn’t take long for folks in the media and car industry to notice a 20-something woman on social media who was passionate about working on cars. Toward the end of 2016, Hartford was contacted by a representative from Vice Media and Michelin Tires. After seeing her doing a “rinky-dink brake job,” she says, the companies invited her to New York to attend a major launch event for Michelin’s new Pilot Sport 4S tire.
While there, Hartford met other auto content creators, who solidified for her an idea that had been planted by Cheryl. “She was like, ‘Have you thought about YouTubing?’ ” says Hartford. “I was like, ‘What do you know, Mom?’ ”
But during her trip to New York, several other creators gave her the nudge she needed. When she got back to L.A., she cleaned out her bank account to buy a camera and started her vlog. The very first video she posted—a walkaround of her 240SX that included a short drive and a stop at a gas station— was viewed 500,000 times. She began educating herself about online car content and earnestly posted three videos per week. During that time, she also taught herself how to drift in the 240SX and was soon able to quit her waitressing job thanks to revenue from her sponsors and channel.
Hartford’s next big break came three years later when she bought her first supercar, a C8 Corvette Stingray. It was Chevy’s first midengine Corvette, and Hartford was able to buy one of the first models to hit the market. Initially planning to leave it stock—intact as it came from the dealer—she instead pulled into an auto shop in Texas after picking the car up in Kentucky.
“It was just supposed to be a fun video putting nitrous on the car,” Hartford says—tacking on a bottle of nitrous oxide, which ups the performance of the engine—“but then we’re like, ‘Well, we should take it to the drag strip!’ ”When Hartford and her team drove the car on the track, they discovered that they were just a few tenths of a second from having the world’s fastest C8 Corvette. She became as fixated on breaking the record as she had once been on learning how to drive stick. “I ate, slept, breathed trying to make that thing faster for a very long time,” she says.
Hartford plays a race car driver in the upcoming film Gran Turismo.
© Heidi Zumbrun
In February of 2021—one twin turbo kit and several other modifications later—she took the car to the drag strip and hopped in the driver’s seat. After a handful of test runs, Hartford drove a quarter mile in 9.41 seconds at 144.84 miles per hour, setting a new world record. One of her sponsors, Motul, put her on a billboard above Sunset Boulevard, along with the tagline “Your Move, Boys.”
From there, Hartford’s career took off. She began partnering with more brands, hosting various races and television shows. She was a special guest on this season’s finale of Hell’s Kitchen. And it was recently announced that Hartford will be piloting the world’s fastest Subaru for ESX Motorsports. Not surprisingly, with all of these developments, the number of her social media followers has increased rapidly.
Throughout her success in the car industry, Hartford has not lost sight of her acting dream—quite the opposite. Leveraging her platform on social media, she landed roles in the 2021 Netflix holiday movie A California Christmas: City Lights, as well as the 2022 Netflix rom-com That’s Amor.
But her biggest break so far hits theaters this summer. At the end of last year, she found out she’d secured a part in the feature film Gran Turismo alongside Orlando Bloom, David Harbour (Stranger Things) and Archie Madekwe (Midsommar). Directed by Oscar-nominated Neill Blomkamp (District 9), the movie is based on the real-life story of Jann Mardenborough, a British race car driver who got his start as a highly skilled player of the PlayStation racing simulation game. (Parts of Gran Turismo were filmed at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria, and the track is featured in the film’s trailer.)
In the movie, Hartford plays Leah Vega, one of Mardenborough’s competitors. She filmed her scenes in Hungary. The shoot, she says, allowed her to feel a peace she rarely experiences. “It’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life,” she says. “I often live with, like, constantly not feeling satisfied with what I’m doing, which I think motivates me to work harder. I had never really experienced peace like I did when I was out in Hungary. I finally booked a movie, and not only that, it’s a car movie. I didn’t feel like I was in a hurry anymore for something.”
As her brand has grown, Hartford has launched several lines of merchandise, including an apparel line called Return to Life, which donates some of its proceeds to mental health nonprofits. She also sits on the board of a newly founded nonprofit called Alive and Well, which seeks to subsidize mental health care.
Emelia Hartford feels at ease when she's behind the wheel and acting.
© Heidi Zumbrun
When I’m acting, like when I’m driving...those are the times that I get to just live.
“Mental health is so important to me,” she says. “I’ve struggled with my side of depression and anxiety, and life isn’t fucking easy. I want to give back. Everything I do is, in a way, also to give back and try to help others.” Hartford also continues to seek fulfillment and clarity in acting classes, which she attends weekly. At each class, she’s given a different scene to work on. When we spoke for this article, she was cast in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty, which examines the American obsession with physical beauty. As someone who is no stranger to the idea of obsessions being fueled by something much deeper, it’s no wonder that Hartford calls this her favorite scene yet.
“When I’m acting, like when I’m driving, I am usually not thinking about it, not grieving the loss of some terrible thing or trying to do this or that afterward,” she says. “I’m an overthinker. I’m constantly thinking of a thousand things at once. Those are the times that I get to just live.”
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