Pro race-car driver Kenton Koch blazes down the track at speeds of up to 180 mph, but he said it doesn’t feel like he’s moving fast at all. Sitting in a Ligier LMP3 Prototype, an Indy car-type vehicle with less power, as a rider for P1 Motorsports, he’s in his own cocoon, a space where he feels neither anxious nor afraid. He was terrified of roller coasters as a teenager, but races are different.
Forces press upon him from all directions, especially straining his neck. The car heats up. Covered head to toe in safety gear, his uniform is drenched in sweat. But Koch is calm. He has the stamina to withstand these conditions, thanks to his bike rides of 15 to 20 miles with up to 1,000 to 2,000 feet of elevation gain several times a week. If he doesn’t stay in shape, he’ll get dehydrated. Worse, he’ll lose.
That doesn’t happen too often for Koch, 22, who has won 72 percent of his races over the last four years (48 wins over 68 races).
“The reason why people love racing is because it’s the only thing they can do that fully detaches them from the outside world,” said Koch, a junior at Cal State Fullerton studying business administration. He takes his courses online now, which gives him the flexibility he needs to travel for races.
“You’re in the cockpit. You’re in control of everything that’s going on,” Koch said. “You’re in control of something that’s just absolutely insane.”
‘The complete package’
Ara Malkhassian, principal of ALARA Racing, remembers watching Koch race for the first time at the Coronado Speed Festival in San Diego. Koch, then 18, was younger than most of the pros, veterans who have been scratching to win the title for three, four years.
There were two races that day. The first, Koch broke away and nobody could touch him as he cruised past the finish line in first place. The second, someone hounded him the whole way, until Koch slowed the car a little bit, causing the other car to have slight contact with him and thus transfer energy to him, diffusing a potential attack to pull away the last lap.
“It was really subtle, but very clever, very wise moves that you don’t expect from someone so young,” Malkhassian said. “He’s the complete package.”
Koch went on to win the 2014 MX-5 Cup Championship while racing with ALARA. In 2016, he won the LMPC Rolex 24 Hour Daytona, and this year, he won the International Motor Sports Association Prototype Challenge Presented by Mazda.
These races differ from other well-known categories like NASCAR, which features spec cars with different engines that run on ovals, and F1, an open-wheel category with races on road courses.
With years of wins under his belt, including the 2012 Mazdaspeed Challenge, 2014 MX-5 cup, 2015 IMSA Prototype Lites, 2016 Rolex Daytona 24, Koch has been suspected of cheating.
During 2014 and 2015, officials took out his motor after a race and replaced it with a new one so they could inspect it. Nothing was found in both instances, he said.
Koch, the son of Chris Koch, an engineer/sales representative for a pacemaker company, and Karen Koch, who, as she puts it, “takes care of everything else,” comes from a modest home in Glendora. Koch uses the money he earns from races to pay for his tuition at Cal State Fullerton.
He races with the pressure of not just winning, but also not crashing. “We wouldn’t be able to afford the crash damage,” said Chris, who never mentioned that directly to Kenton. Chris assumed that was a pressure Kenton must have felt. “That would be the end of his career … we’d have to find a house loan.”
When Koch is driving, he clears everything else out of his mind. He is in control not just of the car, but also of his doubts, his responsibilities, his aspirations.
His focus was tested in 2014, when his mother needed a heart transplant. In 2001, when Koch was 6, she was listed for a heart but turned it down because the medicine she was taking at the time was working and she felt better. Plus, she was taking care of Kenton and his sister, Kelly Chakerian.
Karen would have three internal defibrillators implanted in the interim, but started to not feel well in 2013. She was listed in 2014. No one in the Koch family slept, waiting for the call that could come the next day or three years later. A member of the family had to be within one hour of the hospital, which was difficult with Koch’s racing schedule. He was at the peak of his career, but felt scared and uncertain about his mother’s health.
“I said, ‘No matter what, you have to keep racing,’” she told him. “Just don’t stop.”
Koch’s life has never not involved wheels. At 2, he’d push his little red truck in the dirt, watching his father blaze across the desert in baja races in a VW Beetle Bug. By 3, he was pedaling his tricycle full-speed down the concrete driveway, stopping right before he’d hit the garage, scaring the heck out of his parents. The only way Karen could give him a bath was if she gave him a Hot Wheel car, which Koch would trace around the perimeter of the bath as if it was a race track. By 4, he was flipping off the training wheels on his bike. He wanted to go faster.
He knew he wanted to be a race car driver at age 6. A coach told him he had to wait until he was 8 to race go-karts. “Those were the longest two years of my life,” Kenton said. But when July 5, his birthday, came? He was off and running and would eventually transition to cars by 15.
So when his mother, who had never missed a race prior to getting listed, told him not to stop, he didn’t. He continued to win despite his worries.
In January 2015, Koch returned from a race at 10 p.m. He opened the door and his mother was crying. She had just gotten the call a few minutes earlier. The family rushed to Cedars-Sinai, and after being given one minute to decide to accept the heart or not, the family chose to accept a heart from a 20-year-old girl from Northern California. She was the same age as Koch.
“That really hit home,” Karen said. The family raises awareness about registering to be an organ donor at Koch’s races through autograph-session handouts, school speeches and social media.
Koch will race July 1-2 in New York with P1 Motorsports in the IMSA Prototype Challenge, later competing in Toronto, Quebec; Lime Rock, Conn.; Atlanta; Paul Ricard, France; and Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium.
He never intended to turn pro, not when he started out. He just loved to race. He just loved to go fast. He keeps going because he knows he can go faster.
“You always have to keep pushing yourself. You can never get lazy. You can never get complacent with where you’re at. The minute you get complacent, the minute things start to fall through,” Koch said.
“You always have to keep being at the peak of what you’re capable of.”
