“I don’t got friends. I got family,” is a famous Dominick Toretto quote from “The Fast and The Furious,” but, what’s it like when your family itself is the one driving the cars? One such student with familial ties to racing is senior Tori St. Denis.

Her father, Brian St. Denis, raced sports cars professionally for a while.

“He did chump car, where you build your own car off a base and with [a] team, and then you race that,” she said. “Then he did endurance racing, 24-hour races with six-hour shifts.”

Brian has always been interested in cars.

“He was always a car person, I guess,” Tori said. “His friends had some connections [that got him into] the racing world.”

“He then would teach young, aspiring racers,” she said. “He worked at the Porsche club for a while, so he was teaching [members] how to race [their] Porsches.”

Tori’s fathers life-long passion has influenced her personal interests.

“He’s my biggest inspiration,” she said. “When I was younger, I would sit and watch racing shows. I was super interested in it.”

Tori’s childhood memories tend to be a bit more exciting than most.

“When I was 5, he was at Road America and I was at the race,” she said. “He let me ride in the car with him for the victory lap. It was so much fun.”

Although she didn’t go to many races because “race weekends aren’t great for kids to be around,” Tori’s childhood memories often center around her dad racing.

“[My dad] coming home, having a race car in my garage, hearing him pull it out of the garage and put it in his trailer — those memories of him coming back from big races with trophies, team pictures and t-shirts for us when we were younger, it was a really fun way to grow up,” she said.