From her high-rise condo in Singapore, a bad-to-the-bone 32-year-old Claire Jedrek belts out the lyrics to her racing pump-up anthem one Friday night. “I go zero to one hundred … real quick. Real quick, whole squad on that real sh*t,” she raps, rather terribly, albeit shamelessly. It’s adrenaline, it’s rough and it’s the perfect jam for this motorsports superstar.
Jedrek is a petite 5-foot-5 British-Singaporean with model-worthy cheekbones and girl-next-door appeal. She doesn’t look the way you’d imagine a prize-winning motorsports buff would, but her gleaming collection of trophies says otherwise. In fact, Jedrek is one of Southeast Asia’s most recognizable faces in the race car–driving realm. And although she hails from one of the world’s tiniest nations, better known for its squeaky-clean, gum-free streets than off-the-wall edge, Jedrek dreams big when it comes to igniting a thrill-seeking culture of extreme sports in Singapore.
She may have a shot at making that happen: Steve Jones, an extreme-sports consultant at Venture Xtreme, an adventure sports center, says Singapore is easily “one of the top 10 destinations in the world” for climbing, diving, high ropes and surfing. Increasingly, Asia is hosting some of the world’s largest extreme-sports festivals, like the Kia World Extreme Games, X Games Asia and FISE Malaysia, which have all “helped showcase action sports in those countries,” adds Pete Thompson, the editor of Extreme Sports Channel. Indeed, Jedrek intends to forge a bright, new career out of speed racing — a rarity in prim and proper Singapore.
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