Woman Who Helped Win Indy 500: Thanks Dad, For Teaching Me About Cars!

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — From as far back as she can remember, Nicole Rotondo loved to help her dad tinker around on old cars.

When she was a little girl in flip flops and pigtails, she and her father, Richard Rotondo, 56, would be out in their driveway on Geary Drive in Middletown, working on boats, jet skis, broken-down lawnmowers and cars — basically anything with an ignition switch they could get their hands on.

"He always said I asked too many questions all the time when I was young," the young woman, now 28, laughed. "I remember at Christmas time my friends, all girls, would be talking about their new dolls or other Christmas gifts they'd gotten and I'd be like, 'Oh, that's cool. I got a jet ski with no engine, but me and my Dad are gonna get it running.'"

What her father taught her must have paid off.

Last month, Rotondo became the first female trackside engine engineer to win the Indy 500. The car she specifically worked on was the one driven by Marcus Ericsson, who won the Indy 500 on May 29.

Her employer, Honda Performance Development, which made the winning car, hails Rotondo as a ground-breaking pioneer: "She's the first HPD female engineer to secure victory at The Brickyard," Honda posted on Facebook last week.

Being able to work on a car that won the Indy 500 is a "dream come true" for this little girl from Middletown.

"This is the peak of auto racing. It's faster than NASCAR. If you're interested in car engineering, the Indy 500 is where you're going to work on the fastest, most interesting car engines in the country, if not the world," said Rotondo.

"As a trackside engineer, we monitor the car every time it goes around the track: How fast is it going, is everything working properly — and can we make it go faster?" she explains. "These car engines are incredible. The winning car (Ericsson) drove can reach 242 miles an hour. It probably has six times the horsepower of a regular Honda engine. A regular Honda is probably 2,000 RPMs; these cars can go 12,000 RPMs, which is what makes that incredible sound when they go around the track."

"Of course, this is all stuff that used to be done by hand, by a mechanic, right on the car," she continued. "And now it's all computerized. We track all this on our laptops as the car drives by."

Before she was out of elementary school, Rotondo knew how a car engine works. By age 14, she was able to disassemble an engine and put it back together again — by herself. Her first car? A junkyard salvage she and her dad rebuilt from bottom up in their driveway. Her father used to work as a mechanic; he's now in sales for Snap On Tools.

He and his wife Stacey raised their three children in Middletown.

While her younger sister loves ballet, Rotondo said she always gravitated towards mechanics. She went to the Marine Academy of Science and Technology (MAST), the vo-tech high school on Sandy Hook, and which has a strong emphasis on industrial design and engineering.

Rotondo always thought she would be a mechanic, like her dad, but Richard desperately wanted his daughter to get her college degree. She graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the nation.

Even there, in a student body that is 66 percent male, she was one of the few young women to specifically get her degree in mechanical engineering.

"There's not a lot of us," Rotondo admits. "In the car racing world, there are a lot of women on the marketing and PR side, and a lot of women on the business side. But out on the track there's probably 300 people out there, and 10-15 are women."

That's why Rotondo said she strongly supports young girls being introduced to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

"You really have to get as many girls as possible interested in the lower levels of science and engineering to be able to funnel them to the elite level that I'm now at," she said.

But Rotondo said she's never been underestimated. And out on the track, nobody thinks twice about her gender.

"The cool thing about being a woman in motorsports is that it's so fast-paced nobody has the time to care. You have seconds to work on a car, seconds to make an adjustment as a team. It's all about getting the job done."

Rotondo said she knows who was cheering the loudest back in Middletown when her family watched the Indy 500 a few weeks ago.

"I couldn't have done any of this without my Dad. Anything I had an interest in, he let me do; he encouraged me to follow," she said. "I honestly think I have the coolest job in the world. I get to travel all over the country, working on the coolest car engines. I get to work with some of the best race car drivers on the planet ... If he didn't work on cars with me and bring me to car races as a kid, I never would be here."

"He was always like, I can make that, I can fix that, I can build that. Me and my siblings got to do a lot of things growing up — not because we had the money to do it, but because my Dad had the skills to make it happen. That's the mindset I grew up with: Make it happen. You can make anything happen."