Angel Contreras has wanted to design a car for as long as he can remember — not just any car, but one built for racing.
For years, he talked himself out of it, he said, worried that it was self-indulgent, disconnected from anything useful he could do for the people around him.
Last year, Contreras asked an AI chatbot a direct question: How is motorsports actually good for anyone? The answer that stuck with him was about materials science: Racing pushes engineers toward discoveries that eventually filter into the cars everyone else drives.
It was the permission he’d been waiting for.
Now, 30, Contreras is studying mechanical engineering at City College of San Francisco, working toward a transfer to Purdue University at one of the only U.S. university programs focusing specifically on building cars for motorsports.
His path to building race cars ran through the Marine Corps, which he joined at 18 after a recruiter’s pitch: “If you want to travel, if you want to get your education paid for, if you want to be part of something bigger than yourself, join!”
“It literally spoke to me,” he said.
Contreras trained as a ground electronics technician in the Marines. He was assigned to a tank battalion, and deployed in 2018 for 11 months across Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
In September 2019, the Marine Corps dissolved his entire battalion, and Contreras was given a choice: transfer, switch jobs or leave. At the time, he was looking forward to a five-year, six-figure contract as a field service representative in Bahrain, but the job disappeared before it began when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
It was the kind of setback his father, who died in a car accident when Contreras was seven, had prepared him for.
Todo es perfecto — everything is perfect — his father would always say. When things don’t go your way, it’s a learning opportunity, or else the beginning of a new chapter. If something breaks, you figure out what it taught you, and look forward to what comes next.
Contreras has carried the phrase ever since, half as comfort, half as a puzzle he’s still working out. He remembers trying to understand it as a boy: “I’m like, but you said everything is perfect, and you’re dead,” he recalls. “So I’m like, in my little brain, trying to put it together.”
“Todo es perfecto,” Contreras thought when the Bahrain job fell through: Maybe it was time to get out of the military for something new.
What followed wasn’t smooth. Contreras worked construction for a while in Los Angeles, where he picked up a serious drinking habit.
Eventually he broke free, and enrolled in community college in San Mateo. He transferred to the engineering program at City College of San Francisco in January 2026, and is living out of a camper on his truck while he continues his studies.
Contreras’ dreams of racing returned along with his schoolwork. Heroes Motorsports, which uses racing as therapy for veterans, reached out to him, and in April he participated in his first motorsport race, an eight-hour endurance event in Washington state. The experience made him more determined than ever to build his own car.
“I definitely believe in manifestation,” Contreras said. “You have to literally see it and then it happens.”
Todo es posible.
