Sometimes it’s blood, sometimes is a bond built at the track that’s so strong we mean it when we call our racing friends, racing FAMILY.
The Stewart family extends well beyond blood. Hang out at the podium on Saturday and you’ll be hard pressed not to hear riders from the Micro to the Pro ranks thanking the Stewart family for what they do to help riders succeed at the track. It only seemed appropriate, when I approached Charlie and Cooper about doing an interview that I also include mom and dad in the mix since their involvement in our sport is so enormous.
Jason Stewart: I started riding when I was 6 years old, my parents got me a Yamaha atv, had plenty of friends in the neighborhood that had atvs as well, we grew up riding daily after school and made trails on the farmers land behind our house. Had a Suzuki 230 quad sport until I was 16. I only got to race once or twice in north Georgia on some logging trails.
Once the kids were old enough, I got them Polaris 90s, they literally rode the wheels off of them for a few years. They wanted to race, so we tried one at Durahmtown, I’ll never forget it, we rode all day in the red clay mud and the race was at night. Charlie chose not to race at the last minute. Cooper was ready, or at least we thought he was. When we pulled up to clean quads ready to race and Cooper was looking like a muddy mess. I think there were 6 in the class, Cooper on a stock Polaris, versus some Cobras and DRR’s. We had never seen quads like that! Haha! Needless to say Cooper got lucky with a 5th place. I tell people it was like taking a knife to a gun battle. That was the end of racing for a bit. Around 2015 got them Yamaha Raptor 125s. The boys were just like me riding together every day after school. We heard about a GNCC in Sparta and thought we’d check it out, no quads, just spectators to see what it was about. The boys loved it, we decided to try the southern races starting with Steel Creek. Funny thing, we really had no clue, showed up to a line out to the road, mud everywhere, wife yelling at me that race starts at 8am, I literally unloaded the quads in the road and ran down to sign up. I have to give a shout to the lady that checked us in… she said, “Do you have a transponder, AMA….” I looked at her like she was speaking Greek. She said, “The race is about to start, here are numbers, I’ll try to hold it for a few…. Just come back after the race and we will get it all taken care of.” The boys took off and literally drove on to the start as the last class took off. We appreciated the help at sign up and haven’t missed a GNCC since 2016 Steel Creek.
Action Off-Road is a little different than my main business Action Tire Company, we are a tire dealer in the Georgia and Alabama areas. So you can tell Action is a common theme in our world. Cooper has always enjoyed business and marketing and making money. He had the opportunity to do a business plan for his marketing class, seemed simple enough, he did the project and wrote a solid plan. Ended up getting 3rd in the state of Georgia-DECA competition and got the opportunity to represent his plan and school at the national level. I took his plan and created it with a website and thought it would be a great way to teach the boys are business, the good and bad. Action Offroad is in its 8th year and doing well, we learn new things every day. The main thing is we want to support the sport and promote racing.