At 19, Youngest Monster Truck Racer Is Engineering Her Future

Working toward a mechanical engineering degree at Georgia Tech is the sort of stressful pursuit that calls for blowing off a little steam every now and then.

For Rosalee Ramer, that means climbing behind the wheel of a pink and purple monster truck named "Wild Flower" and smoking the competition at Monster Jam races all across the country.

At 19, Ramer, a Watsonville, California, native, is the world's youngest professional monster truck racer.

At Tech, she's working to engineer a more efficient monster truck — one with a lower center of gravity that would handle the bouncing, bumping and three-story leaps of a Monster Jam race more smoothly.

Meanwhile, she does much of the maintenance work herself on "Wild Flower," which in addition to its decidedly girly color scheme sports images of flowers and a license plate that reads "PRINCESS."

That's meant to send a message to her young, female fans, she says.

"Even if you’re a girly girl you can still work on trucks, or do whatever you want to do," she said in a Georgia Tech profile.

Ramer's double life as a truck racer and student is a busy one. She says she often ends up doing homework on planes while she's headed to and from weekend races.

She's been competing professionally on the Monster Jam circuit since 2015, following her father, Kelvin, who's also a professional monster truck racer, into the trade.

But she first sat in the seat of a monster truck when she was 11, she says, and started driving competitively when she was just 14.

"I've been told that when I was 3 I was holding a flashlight up until midnight or 2 o'clock after a show helping them fix trucks," she said on a 2014 appearance on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

She's also the first person in her family to ever attend college.

"I chose Georgia Tech because if felt like the kind of school I wanted to go to," she said in the profile.

It's also given her inspiration as she works on fine-tuning the next generation of monster truck. Among other goals, she says she'd like to build one of the massive trucks — with wheels weighing 800 pounds each — that could fly over her freshman dorm.

Photos via Georgia Tech and Rosalee Ramer Facebook page